Entitled A Tiger Came into the Garden: Art of Maria Prymachenko, the show is the first such wide-ranging presentation of the artist’s work in Poland.
The Museum of Modern Art explains on its website that “the garden mentioned in the title represents nature, which coexists harmoniously with humans, and in exchange for their work gifts them with all its bounty, while the tiger symbolizes the mysterious, fantastic and wild.”
Curator Szymon Maliborski told the media that the exhibition, which was mounted jointly with the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, features 89 of Prymachenko’s gouaches, or watercolours mixed with chalk, from the late period in her life, executed in her recognizable style involving a decorative line, and flat, intense patches of colour.
Myrosława Keryk from the Warsaw-based Ukrainian House, a co-organizer of the event, has described it as ”a fine opportunity to make Prymachenko’s fantastic art better known to Polish audiences."
She added that the artist, whose life spanned the years 1909 to 1997, experienced all the tragedies of the 20th century: World War I; the great famine in Ukraine, known as the Holodomor; World War II, in which her husband died; the Chernobyl nuclear disaster; and the Russification of Ukrainian culture by the Soviet authorities.
“Throughout all this time, Prymachenko painted works of art that were an inspiration for struggle, perseverance and victory," Keryk said.
The exhibition opens on Friday and runs until the end of June.
It will be the last event held at the museum's temporary premises at 22 Wybrzeże Kościuszkowskie Street (Museum on the Vistula) in the Polish capital. Later this year, the museum will move to its new home in the city centre.
(mk/gs)