From December 9 to 23, Diogenes gallery will host the exhibition "Shaykin".
This project is the result of a long research of restorers, microbiologists, art historians, historians and linguists about the Lviv artist of the second half of the twentieth century, who left his identity anonymous because he hid behind a pseudonym.
The story of these paintings is a story about a myth created by the author, within which it is difficult to say exactly where the real facts are and what is literary imagination. To a certain extent, this is also the case when it can be argued that biography, as the basis for the author's big or small history, often becomes a source of deformation of the perception of a work of art. And it is not only about searching and "finding" something that the author did not actually put in or unwittingly hinted at.
The range of topics - from reflections on his own childhood in post-war Lviv, stories about communication in the artistic environment of the 1960s-1980s (in particular, by Mykhailo Steinberg, Henrieta Levytska, Volodymyr Miller, Hryhoriy Ostrovsky), descriptions of psychedelic experiences to allusions to literary texts and artworks of modernists and non-conformists (for example, Marc Chagall, Mykhailo Larionov, Sholom Schwartz and Mykhailo Rohinsky).
Whether this is a story about the construction of a museum by an unknown artist or a myth about a Lviv vagabond author, one of Les Poètes maudits, is up to the viewer's discretion, but if such an artist did not exist, he would have to be invented.
