21 April — 24 May 2023

The center of Yuri Solomko's works is the combination of the Universe and the Earth in the form of maps and the world in the human dimension. The basis of the effect that the author is trying to create is a paradoxical combination of the soulless surface of the map and the emotions of the characters in the paintings, which evoke reminiscences, sometimes with an established artistic tradition, sometimes with familiar, almost photographic images of everyday life. These can be carefree lovers from rococo painting, the famous La Danse by Henri Matisse, which turns into a tragic danse macabre with the background of a map of modern Ukraine, or almost kitsch pastoral pictures with children of the past century. These images from the past and present are applied to the static expanses of countries and continents with a living brush.

To visualize the appearance of our planet and the celestial sphere, a globe was created, which often becomes the basis for Yuri Solomko's art objects, which depict everyday objects in combination with maps of the Earth or the starry sky and become the basis for elaborate artistic metaphors. Their primary, rather trivial, essence changes, they acquire a symbolic meaning, reminding us of the cosmic scale of our existence.

The game with the scale of the image gives the artist the opportunity to fit into the context of political, military maps, maps of natural resources, the movement of air masses, Man as a generalized image and, at the same time, a specific personality.

The artist elevates man with his daily work, cares, love and death to the planetary scale, comparing the transience of individual human time with the infinite flow of cosmic existence, realizing the idea that even such an infinite quantity as time has its own scale in the human dimension, defined only by imagination of the artist.

The exposition presents works created in Ukraine in pre-war and wartime.

Curator group: Elizaveta Shulyak, Oleksandra Ryzhova, Hanna Klymenko;

Project group: Oleksandr Kuhar, Olena Borymska;

SMM: Oleksandra Kabakov. Design: Malika Umarova