Mykola Malyshko

Born in 1938 in Znamenivka (Ukraine), he lives in Kiev.

The work of Mykola Malyshko, who is not only a painter and sculptor, but also a writer and philosopher, is rarely shown, being deemed outside the orbit of social realism. His oeuvre was constructed away from the dominant trends of the Soviet period. He is concerned above all with matter and his work with the axe, which include his output in a naturalism tinged with primitivism. Wood is his favoured material although he also works with clay and metal. It is hard not to see this preference as related to the landscapes of his native Ukraine, which has primitive beech forests listed as World Heritage sites by Unesco. But what really concerns Malyshko is the material itself, and the process of working on it: “I take my cue from the material itself: I listen to it. I strike it with an axe and I listen – listen to how it speaks.” This distinctive technique explains the rather rough-hewn aspect of his works, their raw surfaces still showing the traces of the tool and the strength that applied it. Among his sculptural references he is just as likely to quote the baroque artist Johann Georg Pinsel, whose works adorn many Ukrainian churches, as the Cubist Alexander Archipenko, also of Ukrainian origin, whom he approaches in his schematic representation of the human figure which, often, is presented as a kind of anonymous, articulated puppet standing, seated or crouched. It is hard to grasp Malyshko’s work without having in mind the sculptures of his contemporaries Lupertz and Baselitz. With the former he shares a liking for wood and the roughness of its treatment; with the latter the fusional relationship, and the liking for primitivism, connected with the formal research of northern Europe.