olechko

Today I headed out to share with a few friends the better places to see art on Andriyivksy and in Podil. We’ve stopped by a few art sellers on the street,  five galleries  and took two coffies on our route.  These are the treasures we found:

Some very decent street art (the better works tended to be are sold by the artists themselves, they come out to the market only on weekends). Below are the pictures by  Shumakov V. with his cute little paintings of Pirogovo; Yuri Kachkin with small Kyiv landmark oils on pane; and tiny oforts by R. Sydorec.  All these were small works that did not cost more then $50 a piece – not bad.

The really good staff we found in Gallery 36 (36, Andriyivsky descent) – well-established and non-presumptious (12 years on the market), it sells mid-range (about $500 per piece) local artists. A few years back we bought from there a levkas by Igor Prokofyev – one of those baby-faced  fuzzy figures in late eighteen hundreds settings.

Then we popped into Hochari gallery where I recognized a little cute sculpture by Pylnyk – I am going back to Lviv to pick it up though – once again, I confirmed that the price markup on Lviv art market in Kyiv is 150%  for the same artists’ works!

The well-advertised White gallery current show did not impress us much. The other galleries Karas Atelier and art center by NaUKMA were closed so Zeh was the last spot on our itinerary. And what a treat it was.

Lovely Margo – gallerina at Zeh- let us dig into the back room fare – all the best current contemporary from Kyiv as well as brilliant upcoming stuff from the regions (the gallery specializes on out0of-towners). Now Yuri Pikul has a solo show there till August 2nd. He is only 23 and does very interesting post-photo realist oils of random landscapes and war-era shots.

Yuri Solomko  with his larger-then-life pictures of preserves is also represented there. He is the renowned artist from whom I’ve been lucky to take classes this spring, organized by and for IWCK.

Also we were really impressed with the paintings by Igor Pereklita, an unconventional Transcarpathian with his surreal poster-like paintings of beauties in typical Ukrainian landscapes.

The crawl made me make a list of tree good restaurants to visit on the Andriyivsky in the near future – Za Dvoma Zaycyamy (a guy in general’s uniform greets you at the entrance there, 34 Anrdiyivsky) Parmezan, 36 Andriyivsky) and Vernisazh(down the street from the first two). We ended up taking coffee at Kaffa (Scovorody st) – it has  great decor inside, ample seating outside and  some sumptuous coffee on their menu.

Three bottom pictures are courtesy of Zeh gallery website.

Tags: gallery, Kyiv, restaurants

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 12:11 am and is filed under Kyiv, art, gallery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.