Ukrainian underground

The Ukrainian underground was the nonconformist art made in Soviet Ukraine from the late 1950s to independence, in deliberate opposition to Socialist Realism. Official exhibition was closed to it, so the art lived in apartments, courtyards, and abandoned buildings: Odesa held one of the first apartment shows in 1956, the one-day 'Under the Arch' exhibition followed in Kharkiv in 1965, and Kyiv's Creative Youth Club (1960-1964) drew painters, writers, and composers together. Sometimes called 'the second wave of the avant-garde', it consciously echoed the innovations of the 1910s-1920s through circles in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv, and Uzhhorod. Banned shows and samizdat shaped its outsider stance; Perestroika dissolved the conditions that made it necessary, and its ideas passed to the next generation of the Ukrainian New Wave.

Defining characteristics

• Deliberate rejection of Socialist Realist doctrine for abstraction, expressionism, and personal symbolism
• Informal display: apartment exhibitions, courtyard hangings, and makeshift venues instead of state galleries
• Mixed-media experimentation: collage, assemblage, and found-object constructions
• Small-scale, often hidden works made outside official commissions and career

Key figures

• Alla Horska (1929-1970) — Kyiv painter and dissident, a leading figure of the Creative Youth Club
• Viktor Zaretsky (1925-1990) — Kyiv painter and muralist of the 1960s apartment exhibitions
• Vagrich Bakhchanyan (1938-2009) — Kharkiv-born graphic artist of the 1965 'Under the Arch' exhibition
• Fedir Tetianych (1942-2007) — Kyiv artist and maker of symbolic objects and performances

Example works

• Man and Infinity — Fedir Tetianych (1980)
• Zonally, Color Concept — Mykola Trehub (1980)
• Once Upon the Night — Nicholas Zalevsky (1974)

Sources

• Ukrainian underground - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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