The Ukrainian Museum in New York City presents A Singular Vision Ilona Sochynsky Retrospective of Painting, a comprehensive exhibition of more than 50 paintings, including many large-scale works from all phases of the artist’s development, on view May 13, through October 7, 2012.
Ilona Sochynsky, The Red Moon, 1991, oil on canvas, 66 x 66 in. © Ilona Sochynsky
Ilona Sochynsky’s painting career, entering its fourth decade, presents an oeuvre of visual beauty, intelligence, intensity and complexity. At its core, it is a profoundly personal journey of discovery. Her earliest paintings explore the imagery of Pop Art (she was especially drawn to the works of James Rosenquist) and Photorealism, a movement prominent in the 1970s. She responded to the latter’s hyperrealism and its subject matter of cars, motorcycles and street scenes, which she reinterpreted in her work to extraordinary effect.
By the 1980s, her focus shifted to a more personal iconography of revealing self-portraits, images of her husband, her sister, and other psychologically compelling imagery that carry within them the universal code of contemporary existence. It is during this probing period that she briefly experimented with a more painterly, expressionist style in order to explore its impact on the content of her work and partly in response to the neoexpressionist movement that dominated the 1980s.
In recent decades, Sochynsky has set aside the subjects of her earlier paintings and made the formal concerns the focus of her art. Thus, a series of small paintings done over a period of five years (2006-2011) is titled Fragment. These and other recent works encompass both abstract forms and recognizable natural forms. They are often rendered in interactive fragments and in a series like Capriccios (2006), break out of the rectilinear boundary into irregularly shaped canvases. These works are at once exhuberant and complex in their formal presentation and in their content. They are, as well, among the artist’s most compelling images. To engage them is to discover the richness of the creative process.
Works for A Singular Vision: Ilona Sochynsky, Retrospective of Painting were drawn from private collections, including the artist’s own holdings, as well as from The Ukrainian Museum’s permanent collection of fine art.
Ilona Sochynsky received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1969 and her MFA from Yale University in 1972. After graduation she successfully ran the Ilona Sochynsky Associates, a graphic design firm, until 1979 when the imperative to paint won out.
Solo exhibitions: The Noyes Museum of Art, the Ukrainian Institute of America
Collections: Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, The Ukrainian Museum, The Noyes Museum of Art, Morris Propp Foundation, and private collections.
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