Folk Impulse in Ukraine’s Modernist Art | Kultura 2025
Date and time:
Monday 13 October, 2025
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
ONLINE
Dr Katia Denysova
📍 University of Tübingen
Postdoctoral Fellow, Eberhard Karl Universität Tübingen
Lecture Title:
Folk Impulse in Ukraine’s Modernist Art
Lecture Synopsis:
In the early 20th century, when the Ukrainian lands were divided between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, many artists from Ukraine experimented with some of the latest and most radical art trends they discovered while travelling and studying in western Europe. Underpinning their innovative formalist explorations, from Symbolism to Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism, was a profound knowledge of and fascination with Ukrainian folk and decorative traditions.
In this seminar, through the practice of Alexandra Exter, Mykhailo Boichuk and Vasyl Yermilov, we will examine how artists worked with the Ukrainian vernacular culture to create a modernist aesthetic during the period of unprecedented socio-political upheaval in Ukraine.
Lecturer
Dr Katia Denysova
Dr Katia Denysova is an art historian and curator specialising in Ukraine’s modernist art. She is the co-curator of the major travelling exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine (winner of the 2023 Apollo Exhibition of the Year Award) and co-editor of the accompanying catalogue (Thames & Hudson, 2022). The show is on view at the Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi in Poland until February 2026. Denysova is a postdoctoral fellow at Eberhard Karl Universität Tübingen in Germany, where she co-leads a research project on abstract art in East-Central Europe supported by the Getty’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. She held the Ukrainian Research in Switzerland (URIS) fellowship at Universität Basel in the spring 2025 term and will be the Lesia Ukraїnka Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 2026.
