Petro Smetana
Aftereffect: Landscapes and Still Lifes
September 13 – October 6, 2019
Reception for the artist: Friday, September 13 from 6:00 to 8:00pm
RSP to attend.
Art at the Institute is delighted to kick off its sixty-fifth season of programming with an exhibition of landscape and still life paintings by Ukrainian artist Petro Smetana. Introduced and curated by Walter Hoydysh, PhD, director of Art at the Institute, this exhibition marks Mr. Smetana’s first solo showing with The Ukrainian Institute of America.
With only a suggestion of place, the man-made and the object, Petro Smetana’s paintings are expansive and tend toward the impossible sum of the present moment, the past, and the future — what was manufactured, built and its consequential fall-out. He doesn’t allow his work to be classified as either abstract or figurative. One moment he seems an abstract painter uniquely attuned to the physical world and another he seems an observational painter with a command of the abstract elements of painting. What he seeks is that which lies between the two.
Petro Smetana studied design and graduated from the Lviv National Forest-Technical University. He is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and has exhibited actively since 2007 in Ukraine, Bulgaria, China, Cyprus, Poland, and the United States. Recent activity includes participation in “Painting 2019,” the VIII All-Ukrainian Triennial in Kyiv (Ukraine) and an exhibition with Green Sofa Gallery in Lviv (Ukraine). He lives and works in Lviv.
Photos by Pavlo Terekhov.
