Alexander Kostetsky

Biography

In the seventh grade Alexander Kostetsky carved a set of chess pieces from wood in the form of medieval knights, with intricately shaped figures. His mother, a sculptor, was seriously ill in those years, and he helped her in her studio.

He was born on 14 November 1954 in Kyiv. His father, Vladimir Kostetsky, was a painter and academician, his mother, Galina Novokreshchenova, a sculptor; his paternal grandfather, Nikolai Danilovich Kostetsky, was a biologist. The boy began to draw early, before he started school, and even as a child he liked to depict forgotten civilizations and fantastic characters. Later he modelled in clay and worked in porcelain and other materials.

He finished the Kyiv art school in the 1970s: some sources give 1973, others 1975. He is believed to have been strongly influenced by the library of his elder brother Dmitry, who collected books on the occult, Freemasonry and philosophy. In 1979 Kostetsky graduated from the Kyiv State Art Institute, where he studied in the studio of Vladimir Shatalin. Drawing in the manner of the old masters came easily to him. He worked out his own oil technique, from the thinnest glazes to dense, thick layers of paint. His early works from his student years and the first years afterwards are painted within Socialist Realism, the official Soviet style, as the institute’s canons demanded; he himself, it seems, was drawn to something else. That something else was the circle of unofficial artists. In 1977 Kostetsky took part in an exhibition of the group Rukh (“Movement”) together with Yuri Kosin, Mykola Trehub, Vudon Baklitsky, Nicholas Zalevsky, Olena Golub and others; the exhibition was described as scandalous. After the institute he worked in an art workshop, went on taking part in underground shows and travelled around Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. From 1983 his solo exhibitions were held in Kyiv, Moscow and Leningrad (now St Petersburg); in 1987 he showed his work at the Institute of Architecture, in 1988 at the House of Cinema.

In 1988, with his first wife, Helen Granova, Kostetsky went to the United States. His exhibitions were held in New York, Washington, Philadelphia and other cities: in 1989 at the Ukrainian Central Art Gallery, the Ward-Lawrence Gallery and the Podval Arts and Poetry Gallery, in 1991 at the Axiom Gallery and the Esoterik Book/Art Gallery, in 1992 at the Russia House Gallery. The collector Norton Dodge bought some of the paintings, and they are in his museum. There the artist also took commissions for icons for an Orthodox church in New York. Sources give his years in the United States differently: according to some, he exhibited there regularly until 1995; according to others, he lived in New York until 1992, visiting Kyiv, and returned home in early 1996.

In the 1990s he took part in gallery fairs at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv (1995, 1997), in an exhibition at the Slavutych gallery (1996) and in a show at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington (1993). His paintings were shown without him at the Europ-Art festivals in Barcelona (1997) and Geneva (1999, 2000). In 1998 an album of his reproductions, with 36 plates, was published in Kyiv, with an introduction by the art historian Olga Kozlovskaya, his second wife. He worked with the Kyiv galleries Nef and Yana Gallery and belonged to the Nef association, founded in 1993, whose members also included Sergey Marus and Oksana Levchishina. He exhibited regularly at the Nef gallery in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, and some of his works remained there on display. In 2001 he was invited to the United States again, and afterwards he showed work in Germany, in Mannheim in 2003. In November 2003 Kostetsky was admitted to the Union of Artists of Ukraine. In 2007 the exhibition “Cartography of the Inner Space” was held at the Book Museum in the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. He travelled to Egypt, and in 2007 to India and Nepal.

His painting is built on a combination of convincingly realistic space with layered meaning, and figures and background seem to pass into one another. He himself called the unusual people in his canvases staffage figures in a mystery of time and space. He was interested in the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism and was in touch with Ernst Fuchs, who visited him in Kyiv. Kostetsky’s works are in the Norton Dodge museum, in the Rardi van Soest Museum of Modern Art in the Netherlands and in the collection of Andrey Fyodorov in Moscow. I would add that the exact make-up of his permanent displays is hard to verify.

The apartment on Velyka Zhytomyrska Street, near Andriyivskyy Descent, became one of the informal centres of intellectual life in Kyiv. Visitors included the human rights activist Semyon Gluzman, the artists Sergey Marus and Ernst Fuchs, collectors, musicians and film directors. The People’s Artist of the USSR Vasily Boroday, a neighbour in the same building, meant a great deal to him: he spoke up for Kostetsky when he applied to the institute and when he was admitted to the Artists’ Union.

Alexander Kostetsky died in Kyiv on 4 January 2010, aged 55.