Ada Rybachuk

Biography

In 1982, on Baikove Hill in Kyiv, about two thousand square metres of reliefs were covered with a layer of concrete. Their authors had worked on them since 1975, and on the whole complex around the crematorium for more than ten years. One of those authors was Ada Rybachuk.

She was born in Kyiv on 27 June 1931. Her father, a career officer of the Red Army, served through the whole war, while her mother and daughter were evacuated to Kazakhstan, where Ada finished four grades of elementary school. From 1945 to 1950 she studied at the Kyiv Art Secondary School and left it with a gold medal. She then entered the Kyiv State Art Institute, in the studio of Oleksii Shovkunenko. In her third year she met the sculptor and painter Volodymyr Melnychenko, whom she married. From then on they did almost everything together and signed their work with a joint abbreviation, “ARVM”.

In 1954 the couple travelled to the North for the first time: they spent May and June on the shore of the White Sea, and from July to September, during a pre-diploma placement, lived on Kolguev Island in the Barents Sea. The topic of her diploma was approved in 1955 and was called “Winter Shore of the White Sea. Kolguev Island”; for its sake they set off on a second expedition, lasting a year and a half. Rybachuk defended her diploma in 1957, a year late. The public defence of hers and Melnychenko’s, on 10 April in the institute’s assembly hall, became in effect their first joint solo exhibition. That same year she joined the Union of Artists of the USSR, while the Ukrainian Union admitted her only three years later. The third and longest trip to the North fell in 1957–1959. In all they spent about seven years there, and those years produced series of linocuts, drawings, children’s illustrations and paintings (“The Chase”, “Lipk, Son of Sevko”, “Elalau. The Great Camp”). Her first commission, still as a student, was a set of illustrations for Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak’s “Reindeer Fairy Tales”. In 1957 she completed the sculpture “Shipboy” and won a silver medal at the World Festival of Youth and Students.

The American artist Rockwell Kent, who met the two Kyivans in Moscow, wrote about them in the preface to the second Russian edition of “Salamina” as people who love the Far North and its inhabitants. He called the reproach that they had lost touch with real life by living in the North unjust.

From the 1960s Rybachuk worked in murals and decorative art for public buildings, as part of a team led by the architect Avraam Miletsky. In 1961 she and Melnychenko decorated the Central Bus Station in Kyiv, then, in 1963–1968, the Palace of Pioneers and Schoolchildren (later the Palace of Children and Youth): mosaics in the hall, the panels “Children of the World”, “The Magic Violin” (dedicated to Maria Prymachenko), “The Sun and the Golden Birds”, “Horsemen”, and twenty-five emblems of children’s clubs. In front of the façade lies a decorative pool, “The Sun, Stars and Constellations”, covering 713 square metres, made of relief, coloured concrete and mosaic. In their work they often drew on motifs of Ukrainian folk art. Some projects were never realised: in 1965 they entered the competition for a memorial to the victims of fascism at Babyn Yar, and later proposed designs for the archaeological park “Ancient Kyiv” and for a complex on Kontraktova Square.

The main undertaking was the Park of Memory on Baikove Hill, built between 1968 and 1982: farewell halls, the earthen terraces of the columbarium, and the Wall of Memory. The wall carried twenty-four compositions in high relief. They unrolled as a band of subjects from world history and mythology, from Prometheus to the Second World War and postwar reconstruction, among them Icarus, Spring, Love, Creativity and Motherhood. When the work was almost finished in 1981, the Ministry of Culture of the Ukrainian SSR decided that the reliefs did not meet the principles of Socialist Realism, the officially required style, and in 1982 they were covered with concrete. The dispute over the complex later turned into a personal quarrel as well: Miletsky, who had left for Jerusalem, accused his former collaborators in harsh words, and they accused him in turn. Israel Goldstein’s documentary “The Wall” (1988) told the story of the work and the campaign to have it restored.

Rybachuk took part in republican, all-Union and foreign exhibitions: in Czechoslovakia, Egypt (then the United Arab Republic), Finland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Poland, the USA, Bulgaria and Norway. In 1959 the couple gave Naryan-Mar 118 of their works, and in 1979 another 33, hoping that an art museum would be founded there. In 1995 she became an honorary member of the People’s Academy of Culture and Human Values (USA), in 1998 an honorary citizen of Naryan-Mar, and in 1999 an honorary member of the Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine.

Ada Rybachuk died in Kyiv on 22 September 2010. In 2013 Melnychenko organised an exhibition of her work in Kyiv. A fragment of the Wall of Memory was cleared in May 2018 (six square metres), and in the autumn of 2021 the composition “Berehynia” was freed. Twenty-three more remain under the concrete.