In 2022, it will be 90 years since the birth of Anatol Anikiejchyk, the outstanding master, the youngest People’s Artist of Belarus (received the title at 40), sculptor, professor, teacher, laureate of the State Prize of the BSSR, laureate of the Lenin Komsomol Prize of Belarus, honorary citizen of Barysaŭ and member of the Union Artists of the BSSR (July 11, 1932, Barysaŭ – February 3, 1989, Minsk).
Anatol Anikiejchyk is one of the most talented, well-known and recognized sculptors. He is an iconic figure in Belarusian art. He worked during the time of active formation and development of the Belarusian school of sculpture. He strongly influenced its fate in the second half of the 20th century. The master’s monumental and easel works have a heroic and social content, a lyrical-poetic interpretation of images with soft shapes and refined contours.
The master’s life and career was not very long, but bright and eventful. Anatol Anikiejchyk as a many-sided personality proved himself in art, pedagogy and social activities. The artist left his invaluable creative legacy in the field of monumental and easel sculpture. They are monumental and memorial complexes (“Breakthrough” in Ušačy District of Viciebsk Region in collaboration with architects Juryj Hradau and Lieanid Lievin), landscape compositions (the monument to Janka Kupala, the People’s Poet of the BSSR, in collaboration with Lieu Humilieuski and Andrej Zaspitski) and easel works (“Minsk Native”, “Spring of Victory” and “Anna Akhmatova”). He was a teacher for a whole galaxy of sculptors of the next generation (Sviatlana Harbunova, Lieanid Davidzienka, Aliaksandr Miatlitski and Uladzimir Slabodchykau) within the Belarusian State Theater and Art Institute, where he taught 30 years.
The exhibition of Anatol Anikiejchyk at the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus covers the master’s career from the 1960s to the 1980s, from the time he graduated from the Belarusian State Theater and Art Institute until the last days of his life. The exhibition presents 15 sculptures from the collections of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, the Janka Kupala State Literary Museum, from the collection of the artist’s family, as well as documents and photos from the collections of the Belarusian State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art, the Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War and from the family archive. The exhibition area also has the oil and graphic portraits of Anatol Anikiejchyk made by his colleagues from the collections of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus. All works are connected with Anatol Anikiejchyk’s artistic career, and they reveal the main areas of the master’s artistic searches. But, only a part of the great creative heritage of the outstanding sculptor is kept in the museum collections.
