Sketches from a Battlefield Notebook

Kryvyi Rih, the city where I was born and raised, gave me a solid artistic education, the image of a man in a cap, and the poetics of the industrial landscape. The masters I studied with instilled in me the habit of constantly sketching.

Sketching is an essential practice for me and an important source material for paintings. I keep making sketches also because I lack the time to work on painting every day. In this way, they compensate for the absence of regular artistic practice. Since my mobilization into the army, sketches have become my main artistic function. This focus on sketching led me to the thought that a notebook of drawings can be a standalone work of art, a kind of artifact. 

And also, that each notebook is a fragment of a diary kept and drawn by the artist, and perhaps the most intimate work he can ever publish.

Each notebook thus becomes like a volume in a writer’s collected works — hence the German title of the exhibition Tagebuch, which contains the word “book.”

At the core of the exhibition are ten paintings, each preceded by sketches, alongside sketchbooks from which new works may emerge.