TUASHO GALLERY
Kyiv, Ukraine

TUASHO Gallery

TUASHO Gallery presents a group exhibition of the artworks performed by 4 emerging Ukranian artists. They operate in different media but share a common conceptualist vision and exercise limitless emotional aesthetics.

The 2D pieces are located in harmonious balance around a bronze face sculpture by Nikita Zigura in the centre. Sergey Melnitchenko's 'Young and Free' inspiring photo series is arranged opposite to Anna Kostritskaya's mysterious antipode black-and-white portraits. And the centre of aesthetic tension is a large hallucinative image by Rita Maikova. This powerful canvas provokes considerations about human nature and our impressions, and actively interacts with the artworks of other represented authors. The exhibition is an organic whole is a conscious set of messages and emotions, which by their synergy show how everything is reborn in dynamics and contrasts. Displaying emerging Ukrainian art is intended to leave the viewer with an insight into a distinct visual culture.

Sergey Melnitchenko: Transvestites, girls bathing in tubs of beer, drunk actors and even more drunk visitors. All of this is the club where I’m working. It’s been one year since I came to Asia to work as a dancer. The last few months we have been performing in one Chinese club, which is more like a huge bar with a stage, because no one of the visitors is dancing here. At one moment I realized how many great things are going on here. That's how the series “Behind the scenes” appeared.

This is the reverse, the invisible side of the club, the atmosphere, a part of which I became. Behind the scenes there is more burlesque than on the stage, the concentration of sexual fluids is more powerful than oxygen. There’s no falsehood — it’s not a scene, it’s their everyday life, our life, or rather mine. (Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer 2017)

Rita Maikova: These artworks seem to be are approaching the way we remember people and events because a whole bunch of heterogeneous associations about an object always pop up in memory. So the artist’s works combine various visual forms, but they also seem to store even textures and smells that play with the viewer's subconscious.

Rita’s images are a game of guessing and inventing, cumulative destruction of expectations by means of colour, space and idea, this is a call to deny the concept of the whole and appeal to fragments, of which we are composed in the era of clip thinking, being bright and fragmented. Absolute freedom in painting allows the artist to reveal imagination and create capacious fantastic images.

Nikita Zigura: Ukrainian sculptor. At his creative work, he combines classic plastic traditions and new art trends, experiments a lot with the shape and material. Over the last decade, he has been working on the project “The New Archeology”. The artist considers that in the midst of global environmental crisis art cannot stand aside from these problems. The project is dedicated to the current subject of environmental conservation and changes in the environmental consciousness of mankind. According to the author, the exposition is based on geometric compositions of small welded metal elements and multicoloured pillars made of compressed debris, reminiscent of ancient temples that we can see by visiting the excavations. This project is a peculiar scaling of global trends in the exhibition space. The time-compressed debris pillars are like a soil cut where you can see the specificity of time. Or maybe these are the huge skyscrapers which invaded our cities. They are constructed on the principle of absolute symmetry. Uncaused and irrational consumption is another aspect of the project. Do people need as much as they “need” to have? Where is the reality, and where is the imposed illusion? The Golden Pyramid is flipped and standing on one peak - this is not a stable position...

Apart from that Nikita creates eco-sculptures that integrate living and inanimate matter, cold metal and wild grapes, which gradually entwines art objects. In his projects he has two goals: the first is to attract artworks to the eco-culture of the present, the second is to try to get the viewers' attention to this range of issues.

The sculptor works on cast acrylic sculptures (projects "EDEN" and "WELKIN"). These are polychrome sculptures that use the latest technology in synthesis with classical techniques. The generalized shapes of the work are accentuated by a polished surface that creates extraordinary depth and richness in colour. This homogeneous texture contrasts with the ornamental design of a starry sky, oriental arabesque or a world map that covers elements of a composition like a pattern.

Nikita Zigura has been active in exhibitions both in Ukraine and abroad. He is the author of many monumental and park sculptures installed in the public space of Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, and other cities of Ukraine. He recently collaborated with Yehor Zigura on a sculpture "Unity" installed on the Dnipro Quay in Kyiv. The sculpture has already become one of the most visited places in Kyiv.