The exhibition presents about 40 paintings from the collection of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus and the collection of the artist’s family. The paintings created by Ivan Dmukhaila during the 1950s–2000s are all images of Belarusian nature, a subject so close to the artist’s heart. His art makes it obvious that that the focus of his creative pursuits was improving what he truly loved and appreciated – his landscape painting. Nature appears in his works as a syncretic unity of all its elements, of which man was an integral part.
The subjects of Ivan Dmukhaila’s paintings, at first glance, are simple and unpretentious – rivers, trees, fields, houses, churches. However, the hidden leitmotif of the artist’s work was the theme of the Eternal and Eternity. Perhaps that is why his works, in fact, are devoid of signs of time. The past and the present are not in opposition, are not isolated from each other, but exist in a certain spatio-temporal unity. Landscapes by Ivan Dmukhaila create a harmonious panorama of the coexistence of man and nature. The artist’s style, seemingly self-effacing, is most of all meant to poeticise everyday life. The sincerity of feeling, stemming from impressions of nature, the attractiveness of imagery are an integral part of the harmonious inner world, the individual feeling of the author. A master of lyrical landscape, Ivan Dmukhaila skillfully used tonal relationships, striving to convey light and richly coloured shadows, to build spatial depth. At the same time, his landscapes affect the viewer not because of elaborate subjects and complexity of composition, but with the entirety of sensations embedded in the pictorial fabric of the work. And this is where Ivan Dmukhaila’s talent as a colourist truly manifests itself. In some paintings, the artist intensified the colour, consciously overemphasising it in order to give the work a unique psychological acuity. In others, on the contrary, everything is built on halftones, barely perceptible colour nuances that create an almost weightless, silvery, pearlescent pictorial fabric. What was fundamentally important to the artist is not what to paint, but how to paint. At the exhibition, one can see several works by Ivan Dmukhaila sharing an almost identical motif. But since each time the artist looked at nature through a slightly different lens, reflecting on the canvas his newest impressions, excitement and emotional turmoil, each of these paintings look self-sufficient. In general, his works, full of light and air, contain all those manifestations of natural life that he strove to express – freshness and spontaneity, dynamics and tranquility.
Even today in Ivan Dmukhaila’s body of work there is something real, full of charisma, capable of involving the viewer on an emotional level in a world created by the maestro on his canvases...
