01.09 - 28.09.10
Rococo's not Dead. Volodymyr Kostyrko

 

While issues of national history are being discussed in Lviv, Volodymyr Kostyrko uses the space of Ya Gallery Art Centre to recreate his own myth of Halychyna's "golden age". In the artist's opinion, it's rococo - times of original thinking and creative self-expression. "Goths and punk-rockers are nothing but a pitiful resemblance of people in wigs who started the Enlightenment", states Volodymyr and leads forefront the main stars of baroque Lviv - Georg Pinzel and Bernard Meretyn.   Behind the renown classics stands a whole party of anonymous characters with athletes' bodies and faces of criminals. With the signature wigs on their heads they leave no doubt that their "Rococo's not Dead" slogan is very natural. As though it was not Kostyrko who paraphrased the common expression, but the following century's punks appropriated the words of Halychyna noblemen. 

Kostyrko's "mix of history, erotica and irony" is not accidental, but conceptual. Reconstructing the ideal of the "universal person" the acknowledged Lviv artist challenges the contemporary person, comparing and opposing the latter's spiritual weakness to the creative potential of the person of the past.  Though it can be only a myth, it is revived in the "old craftsmen" technique as the artist's dream of the better world. "History of a country must be attractive", and art must create an illusion to draw a person's attention to him or herself on each stage of one's establishing as a Creator. A human kin to God: myth or reality?  

This question is to be answered independently by everyone. But Volodymyr Kostyrko's answer is obvious:  Rococo's not Dead, whatever lies behind the "rococo".

 

 

Autor's page
Volodymyr Kostyrko