11.09.1946–present
Anatoliy Kryvolap
Anatoliy Kryvolap studied at the Kyiv art institute, took part in the Picturesque Reserve group in the 1990s and worked on the cycle “Ukrainian Motive”: fifty canvases for which he received the Shevchenko Prize in 2012. He began as a realist and later turned to Fauvist and abstract landscapes. Since the 2000s he has lived and worked in the village of Zasupoivka near Yahotyn.
Biography
The first collector of his work was the Polish collector Ryszard Wroblewski. It is not known when this happened, but for an artist who was then still looking for his language, such a buyer was a rare piece of luck.
Anatoliy Kryvolap was born on 11 September 1946 in Yahotyn. He entered the institute in 1969 in the pedagogical faculty, but soon changed his mind and moved to painting. He studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute, in the studio of Viktor Puzyrkov, and graduated in 1976. From that year he has regularly taken part in regional and international exhibitions.
For some time after the institute he kept to realist painting and Impressionism. In the mid-1980s Fauvist devices appeared in his work: dense, deliberately open colours. Abstraction was added later. In 1990 Kryvolap joined the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. For three years, from 1993 to 1995 (by other accounts, from 1991 or 1992), he took an active part in the Picturesque Reserve, an art group that is prominent in the history of recent Ukrainian art. The cycle “Ukrainian Motive” began in those same years. In the early 2000s Kryvolap gradually returned to landscape, but with the same boldness of colour.
His first solo exhibitions were held abroad: in 1992 at the Donti Gallery in Nuremberg, in 1993 at the D’art Gallery in Toulouse, in 1996 at the Kaspari Gallery in Fürth. In Kyiv he has shown since 2000: at the ARTEast Gallery, at the Sovi art Center for Contemporary Art, and at the Person and Karas galleries. Later came “Landscape of the XXI Century” (2011, OntoArtGallery) and “Ukrainian Motive” (2012, Mironova Gallery). There were still later shows: “Artefacts of the 1980s” at the Karas Gallery (2019) and “Night… The Imprint of Time” at the National Museum “Kyiv Art Gallery” (2022).
In the 2000s he left Kyiv for Zasupoivka, a village not far from his native Yahotyn, and has worked there ever since. The publisher Atlant UMC, on the initiative of the patron Yuriy Komelkov, brought out three albums about him in Ukrainian and English: two in the “Painting” series (2006 and 2008, both devoted to “Ukrainian Motive”) and one in 2009 under the auspices of the National Art Museum of Ukraine.
On 9 February 2012 Kryvolap was awarded the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in the fine arts category for the cycle of fifty works “Ukrainian Motive”. Since December 2016 he has sat on the committee for this prize. In 2021 he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
A separate strand of his work is linked to the Church of the Intercession in the village of Lypivka in the Makariv district of Kyiv Oblast. Together with Ihor Stupachenko he was one of the chief painters of the murals for the new church (by some accounts in 2014–2019; by others, in 2019–2023). Before being installed on the walls, the works were shown at the Lavra gallery. The original building was destroyed during the Russian occupation of the area in 2022, and in 2023 Kryvolap created murals for the restored church. It seems to me that this episode shows how far he has moved from the showy colour of his early years: colour in his work has long been a material in its own right.
On 20 August 2025, by decree of the President of Ukraine, Kryvolap was given the title National Legend of Ukraine.
Profile notes