Uladzimir Kozhukh (1953 – 2017) is a vivid representative of the generation of artists who started out in the 1970s/80s and sought to break out of the realist framework established in painting of the time, devoting their creative path to the search for new forms of expression of their worldview.
The exhibition features about 40 paintings by Uladzimir Kozhukh dating from the 1980s to 2010s from the collections of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus and the collection of the painter’s family. The viewer will have the opportunity to trace how the artist’s style evolved from his early work, in which the influence of the stern painting style of the 1960s – 1970s is evident, to his later works, often characterised by art historians as “ethnomodernist”, the semantics of which originates in the archaic folk and sacred art of Belarus. The themes of Uladzimir Kozhukh’s body of work give an idea of how wide the range of issues concerning the master throughout his career was: social issues, war, Belarusian cultural traditions, folk festivals, mythological motifs, Christianity, Belarusian landscape, the image of the woman.
Uladzimir Kozhukh was born on March 7, 1953 in Dragichyn, Brest region. In 1978 he graduated from the Belarusian State Theatre and Art Institute, in 1983 – from the creative workshop of the USSR Academy of Arts in Minsk under the direction of Mikhail Savitsky. Since 1981, he was an active participant of exhibitions in Belarus and abroad. Honoured Artist of the Republic of Belarus (2004).
Passed away on July 6, 2017.
The works of Uladzimir Kozhukh are in the collections of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus, other Belarusian museums, as well as in private collections in Belarus and abroad.
The exhibition runs until March 24, 2024.
Exhibition curators are Mikalai Mishchanka, head of the service sector of the Exhibition Department, and Franz Korzun, researcher at the Exhibition Department of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus.
