Ivan Marchuk: Art as a call to compassion
By Svitlana Dukhovych
"The motto of my entire artistic career has been: ‘Hurry up to do good!’ Everyone does good in their own way. I have dedicated my whole life to art," says Ivan Marchuk, a world-renowned 88-year-old Ukrainian artist. Despite his age, Marchuk travelled to Rome to attend the opening of his exhibition on February 10, organized at the Palazzo della Cancelleria with the support of the Embassy of Ukraine to the Holy See. The exhibition, featuring around sixty works, will be open to visitors until February 24.
A passion for painting
Ivan Marchuk was born in 1936 in the village of Moskalivka, in Ukraine’s western Ternopil region. His love for art emerged at an early age. He recalls beginning to paint as a child, despite growing up in a poor family without access to basic drawing tools like pencils or watercolours. Instead, he used the juice of flowers to create his images. As a teenager, he was certain of his calling to be an artist. After completing his studies at the Ivan Trush School of Decorative and Applied Arts and the Lviv Academy of Arts, he moved to Kyiv in the late 1960s. There, he worked as an artist at the Institute of Superhard Materials of the National Academy of Sciences and later at the Monumental and Decorative Art Complex, where Soviet artistic uniformity was the prevailing ideology. "I completed my assigned tasks quickly and had much free time," he recalls. "I began drawing on small sheets with pen and ink, and I was very happy because I was creating something new. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I felt it would lead to something beautiful."
Art under surveillance
Marchuk’s artistic style did not conform to the norms of socialist realism. Any non-figurative or abstract form was deemed ideologically dangerous by the Soviet regime. "My works were not accepted for exhibitions; they were banned," he explains. "But I needed to work. Slowly, I found ways to display my paintings in various informal venues—corridors of the Writers’ Union, the Composers’ Union, the Amosov Clinic, and the Medical Library—since official exhibition spaces were closed to me. My work was labeled amateur art, yet it remained under constant scrutiny."
The birth of Pliontanism
Ivan Marchuk’s artistic journey has been one of continuous exploration of new styles and techniques, culminating in his unique method called "pliontanism" (from the Ukrainian word meaning "to weave"). "In 1972, I was in the village of Sedniv in the Chernihiv region. It was November, and I saw the bare forest trees. I thought: ‘What a drawing, what a wonder!’ And I told myself, ‘I will paint like this and even better.’ That very day, I understood how to do it, and thus, the pliontanist painting technique was born. It was a new artistic approach in the twentieth century."
Exhibitions around the world
Unable to fully develop his artistic potential under Soviet totalitarianism, Marchuk emigrated. "For nearly twenty years, my work was banned," he recalls. "When Perestroika arrived, I left immediately. I wanted to be free and to work. I took ten paintings and ended up in Sydney. That marked the beginning of an intense period, almost like a ‘conquest of the world’—but through art." In 2007, the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph included Marchuk in its list of "100 Living Geniuses." The artist has held more than 200 solo exhibitions in various countries. When asked how young painters can succeed, he advises: "Take a calendar and turn all the red days into black ones. Live as I do—with no holidays, no breaks. I have never celebrated my birthday, for instance." Marchuk sees his dedication rewarded when he witnesses the emotions of those viewing his works. "Doing good is a joy. Doing evil… I don’t understand how people manage it. Evil takes little effort. But doing good, in a figurative sense, is costly. And yet, evil is just a game. Killing people, as we see today, has become a game."
No more paintings on war
Marchuk returned to Ukraine in 2011, but the full-scale war that erupted in early 2022 forced him to leave once again. Despite his age and sorrow for his homeland, he continued working. "I had a painting—still have it—titled And I Saw the Earth Covered in Fish, inspired by the Chernobyl disaster. Then came this war, which I experienced firsthand, and I painted a small piece called And I Saw the Earth Covered in Bodies. The entire land is covered with people lying on the ground... It is reality. Then I was asked about my war-related work, and I said: No more. No more paintings on war. Because people already see war in reality, they are driven mad by pain, they lose their lives. How can I depict this and show it to them again? They see it with their own eyes." He concludes, reflecting on his long artistic journey: "I have lived a life of sacrifice. But what I have done, as they say, justifies all the sacrifices. I am truly content with what I have achieved."
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