Illya Chychkan

Biography

Chychkan’s first solo exhibition, “Mutation Gen”, opened in Kyiv in 1993, at the gallery of the Artists’ Union of Ukraine. By then he had been taking part in group shows for several years, so his solo debut came late.

The second exhibition, “Alter Idem”, held in 1994 at the Brama Centre of Contemporary Art in Kyiv, lasted one day. The artist himself broke it off: members of a women’s club meeting in the same premises had tried to cover his works with pieces of cloth.

Chychkan was born on 29 August 1967 in Kyiv, into a family of artists. His grandfather, Leonid Chychkan, was a socialist realist painter, the official Soviet style, and taught at the Kyiv Art Institute; his father, Arkadii Chychkan, belonged to the nonconformists, artists working outside official Soviet art, and took part in the “Exhibition of 13” (1979), a quiet stand by Ukrainian painters against socialist realism. Illya became an artist of the third generation. There is no documentary information about his training, and I would not venture to judge it. In 1988–1989, together with Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, Maksym Mamsikov, Vasyl Tsagolov, Valeriia Trubina, Yurii Solomko and Illia Isupov, he founded the group Paris Commune. The name came from the Kyiv street of the Paris Commune (now Mykhailivska Street), where the squat stood: for most of its members it was home, studio and meeting place. The group’s art was directed against the bureaucratic cultural institutions left over from Soviet times. The squat lasted until 1993.

In the 1990s Chychkan’s name became linked with the New Wave in Ukrainian art. This movement is described as the Ukrainian version of the Transavantgarde, an early form of postmodernism, and as a response to the changes that followed perestroika. From the late 1990s he showed work almost every year, sometimes in several solo exhibitions a year. They included “Novyi zhyvopys” (“New Painting”; L-Art Gallery, Kyiv, 2000), “Girls and Rabbits” (Regina Gallery, Moscow, 2001), “Monkey or Man” (Kyiv, 2005), “Kiev Winter” (Bereznitsky Gallery, Berlin, 2007) and “Monkeywood” (Kolektsiia Gallery, Kyiv, 2011).

Chychkan’s works have been shown at biennials in São Paulo (1996), Johannesburg (1997), Prague (2003) and Belgrade (2004), and at the European biennial Manifesta (2004); by some accounts, his works were also shown at MoMA. In 2003, at the Kyiv exhibition “Invocation of the Karmapa” (curator Yevhen Minko), he presented the painting “It”; in 2008 it was sold at auction at Phillips de Pury. In 2009 Chychkan represented Ukraine at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Together with the Japanese artist Miharu Yasuhiro he made the project “Steppes of Dreamers”: a multimedia installation with music, video and performance in the Palazzo Papadopoli. The boxer Volodymyr Klitschko took the role of curator of the project. Chychkan also photographed this role, in the photograph “Curator-Weightlifter”.

Later the idea of “psychodarwinism” became central, and he works on it with his daughter Alexandra, also an artist. The exhibition “New Psychodarwinism” is built on famous paintings from the Tretyakov Gallery, in which the figures are shown as monkeys. In conversation with Marat Gelman, the critic Kostyantyn Doroshenko linked this to a rejection of elitism and hierarchies. In 2017 a bilingual catalogue, “PsychoDarwinism. Back to the Roots”, was published in Kyiv.

Chychkan lives and works in Kyiv and Berlin. His works are in the collections of Victor Pinchuk and Tetiana Franchuk.