Ivan Marchuk

About the artist

IVAN MARCHUK

People’s Artist of Ukraine (1996), laureate of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine (1997), knight of the Order of Freedom, recipient of the presidential National Legend of Ukraine award (2021). Listed in The Daily Telegraph’s Top 100 Living Geniuses of 2007.

Biography

Ivan Marchuk was born on May 12, 1936 in the village Moskalivka of the Ternopil region of Ukraine (at the time Volhynian Voivodeship of the Polish Republic) into a poor peasant family. Ivan Marchuk's father was a well-known weaver throughout the district. Ivan had three sisters. He started drawing as a child.

“There are few pictures that I painted with my head, my mind. They just seem to come to me. It's as if you unwind a ball of visions, and gradually a picture emerges"

Despite the lack of materials, he created art with natural pigments from flower petals, grass and fruits. After seven years of primary school, he studied decorative painting at the Ivan Trush Lviv School of Applied Arts from 1951 to 1956. Marchuk described this period as transformative, thanks to progressive teachers who inspired him to study outside the ideologically safe space of socialist realism. In 1959 he joined an underground group led by one of his teachers, who introduced its members to unauthorized art, history, music, literature and religion. After completing mandatory service in the Soviet army, Marchuk went on to study ceramics at the Lviv Institute of Applied Arts, graduating in 1965. To make money, Marchuk also worked at an organization that made billboards and posters for factories, clubs and theaters. He then moved to Kyiv. From 1965 to 1968 Ivan Marchuk worked at the Institute for Superhard Materials of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

From 1968 to 1984 Marchuk made illustrations for Soviet publications at the Kyiv Factory of Monumental and Decorative Art. During this time, experimenting with different artistic forms in search of his own creative method and path in art, he started to create the polystylistic and polythematic series of works “Voice of My Soul”, which will branch off into new series throughout his career.

This period of his life is also when the KGB began to persecute him for his non-conformist leanings, with the repression reaching a peak in the 1970s. The Soviet authorities were particularly concerned with Marchuk’s use of dark colors, which, in their opinion, did not correspond to the typical bright images of socialist realism. In addition to accusations of deviating from socialist realism, the KGB suspected Marchuk of supporting Ukrainian nationalism because he came from Lviv, spoke Ukrainian and painted Ukrainian public figures. Denied membership in the Union of Artists of the USSR, he was unable to participate in exhibitions and sell his works. Marchuk's first exhibition in Kyiv wasn’t until 1980. After he was fired from the Kyiv Factory of Monumental and Decorative Art, the artist began a long period of life abroad. He traveled to Australia in 1988, spent a year in Canada, and lived in the US from 1990 to 2001, where he continued to create paintings.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, Marchuk decided to return to Ukraine. Due to the full-scale war started by the Russian Federation in Ukraine in 2022, the artist was forced to leave Ukraine once again and currently resides in the Austrian capital of Vienna. He continues to draw, creating new and supplementing existing series of paintings. Ivan Marchuk's friends and local Ukrainian community in Vienna support the artist by creating the opportunities to exhibit his works for the people to enjoy, which has always been the biggest aspiration of the artist.

Artistry

The range of artistic styles passed through the prism of Marchuk’s unique worldview and transferred onto canvas is phenomenally wide - from primitivism (with clear archetypal features) to realism, hyperrealism, abstractionism, abstract expressionism, surrealism and abstract surrealism. By manipulating proportions, rhythm and color, Marchuk creates subconsciously and influences the subconscious.

Marchuk invented an original technique called “plyontanism” (from the Ukrainian word "plyontaty" - to weave, intertwine, thread) in which paint is applied in thin colored lines that intertwine at different angles, creating the effect of volume and luminescence. Marchuk's style, bordering on man and machine made due to its intricacy and labor intensity, is practically impossible to recreate. He first used this technique in a landscape painting in 1972. Plyontanism became the artist’s signature style – an original way to transfer his perception of the world onto canvas characterized by deformation of images, asymmetry of color and rhythmic contractions of brushstrokes.

Ivan Marchuk has organized his paintings into fifteen series "Voice of My Soul", "Landscape", "Blooming", "Shevchenkiana", "Color Preludes", "Portrait", "Still Life", "New Expressions", "White Planet I", "White Planet II", "Dreams Flooding", "Looking into Infinity", "White and Black. Dialogue", "Blind cycle", "Vienna Rhapsodies".

Throughout his more than 60-year-long career, Ivan Marchuk has held nearly 200 solo and collective exhibitions on 5 continents of the world, and "woven" hundreds of thousands of color and monochromatic kilometers of extraordinary plyontanism in thousands of artistic masterpieces, thus demonstrating the incredible human potential to create art.

The philosophical themes of his paintings convey the dramatic tension experienced by humanity and resonate with the challenges of the modern age. Using art, Marchuk has constructed his personal vision of the world, rooted in high aesthetics and focused on the future, and has offered his own vision of deep philosophical themes of human existence. His works play a powerful role in cultural diplomacy, helping to shape a positive image of Ukraine on the world stage.

Honors and Awards

1997 – Awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine

October 2007 – Included in The Daily Telegraph’s list of Top 100 Living Geniuses

June 2016 – Awarded the Order of Freedom in Ukraine

August 2021 – Presented the National Legend of Ukraine Award by the President of Ukraine