Odesa has its own color of freedom. It cannot be reduced to a single shade — it was born from experimentation, inner independence, and artists’ desire to speak in their own language.
We invite you to the lecture “The Color of Freedom: Tradition and Experimentation in the Work of Odesa Artists” on August 29 at 4:00 PM. The lecture at the Korsaks’ Museum of Contemporary Ukrainian Art will be a conversation not only about artistic movements and names, but also about whether color can become a gesture of freedom and whether art can be a way of remaining free despite rules, systems, and the passage of time.
Lecturer — Maryna Ponomarenko (Kyiv), PhD in Art History.
The lecture will explore Odesa art of the 20th and 21st centuries: from the experiments of the 1910s–1920s to the Odesa underground of the 1960s–1980s, the New Ukrainian Wave, and contemporary post-conceptual practices.
Special attention will be given to color as an essential element of artistic language — from a means of emotional expression to an independent intellectual and conceptual structure within an artwork. We will trace how artists’ ideas about freedom, tradition, and experimentation changed from one generation to another.
This dialogue will bring together Sonia Delaunay, Oleh Sokolov, Yurii Yehorov, Yurii Kovalenko, Lev Mezhberg, Oleh Voloshynov, Moisei Chereshnia, Viktor Maryniuk, Volodymyr Strelnikov, Oleksandr Dmitriev, Valentyn Khrushch, Liudmyla Yastreb, Yevhen Rakhmanin, Oleksandr Roitburd, Yurii Leiderman, Stas Zhalobniuk, and other Odesa artists.
August 29, 4:00 PM
Korsaks’ Museum of Contemporary Ukrainian Art
Lutsk, 1 Ivana Korsaka St.
Participation is included with the museum admission ticket.
The lecture will take place as part of the grant project Educational Barrier-Free Hub “Art for All.” The project is supported by Switzerland within the Swiss-Ukrainian UCORD project “Ukraine’s Cohesion and Regional Development,” implemented by NIRAS Sweden AB. The partner responsible for implementing the grant component of the programme is @ndi_ukraine.
