Oleksandr Rojtburd

Biography

In September 2019 more than a thousand people gathered in Odesa for a rally in defence of a museum director. The director was Oleksandr Rojtburd, and the regional council had just dismissed him before the end of his term. He called what was happening a “cultural Maidan”: the crowd had been brought together by neither politics nor economics, but by a question about a museum.

He had taken over the museum on 19 March 2018, on a five-year contract. By then he was fifty-six, with almost forty years in art behind him.

He was born in Odesa on 14 October 1961. In 1983 he graduated from the art and graphic faculty of the Odesa Pedagogical Institute. From 1989 he was a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (according to some reports, he no longer is). His first solo exhibition took place in Odesa in 1985, at the gallery of Maryna Zharkova. In 1990 he showed work in Moscow, at the gallery of Marat Gelman, and from then on exhibited often in Moscow galleries: in 1993 three of his shows ran there at once, “…in White”, “…Ladies…” and “Portrait…”. The collapse of the USSR came while he was establishing himself, and later critics link his painting with post-Soviet postmodernism: ironic, self-consciously painterly, with mythological and archetypal subjects and references to antiquity. He is counted among the Ukrainian New Wave, and according to some reports he was also a co-founder of the theory of the Ukrainian Transavantgarde. His late works, by some accounts, move away from sarcasm and drama towards quiet irony and intimacy. I would not want to judge this from descriptions alone: I have no published catalogues at hand.

In 1993 Rojtburd became one of the founders of the New Art association in Odesa: until 1999 he was its art director, and from 1999 to 2001 its president. In 1997–1999 he chaired the board of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Odesa, and in 2001–2002 he was regional coordinator of the festival “Cultural Heroes”. Curating occupied him for many years: “New Figurations” (1991), “Free Zone” (1994), “Academy of Cold” (1998), “Salon of the Unsettled” (2002) and other projects in Odesa, and in 2002, together with Oleksandr Solovyov, he put on “Xenophilia” at the Gelman Gallery in Kyiv. From 2002 he ran the Gelman Gallery in Kyiv, and lived and worked in Kyiv and Odesa.

Among his larger exhibitions were “Everyday Life in Pompeii” (Kyiv, 1997), “Video Time” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2000), “Plateau of Mankind” at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), “Crucified Buddha” at the Museum of Cultural Heritage in Kyiv (2001, curated by Kostyantyn Doroshenko), and a retrospective at the Bereznitsky Gallery in Kyiv (2003). In 2013 came the project “Mantru het!” on Independence Square, and in 2015 “Rojtburd Variations” at the Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art. At the Book Arsenal in Kyiv in 2016 a separate room was given over to large-format, provocative works by him. His works are in the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, PinchukArtCentre, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana.

He made many public statements, and some of them were contentious. He took part in the Euromaidan protests of 2013–2014 and kept an active diary on social media, from which a chapter was compiled for Antin Mukharsky’s book about the Maidan. In 2017 he sharply criticised the authorities’ language policy, which led to quarrels with Mukharsky and other opponents. In 2018 he signed an open letter from Ukrainian cultural figures in support of the film director Oleh Sentsov, imprisoned in Russia.

His dismissal from the museum dragged on for years. In February 2020 the Prymorskyi District Court of Odesa ruled it unlawful, in May the court of appeal overturned that decision, and in 2021 the Supreme Court of Ukraine nevertheless found the dismissal unlawful. From October 2020 Rojtburd was a member of the Odesa regional council for European Solidarity. He dreamed of opening a museum of contemporary art in Odesa.

He died on 8 August 2021 in Kyiv. After his death the minister of culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko, announced that the ministry intended to create such a museum in the artist’s memory; there is an Oleksandr Rojtburd Lane in Odesa. In 2024 PinchukArtCentre held the exhibition “Theorem of Power”.