Walera Martynchik
WALERA MARTYNCHIK
Please click on the pictures on the right for a larger view.
Walera Martynchik has successfully exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Holland, Brussels and London. His paintings are in the Museum of Modern Art, New Jersey in the collection of Nancy and Norton Dodge and in private collections around the world.
Born in 1948 in Belarus, Walera Martynchik studied at the Minsk College of Fine Art from 1966 - 72. He was the founder of 'Forma' a group of non conformist artists in Belarus in 1987. He immigrated to Warsaw in 1989 and has lived in London since 1990.
"The art of Walera Martynchik is the summit of our Soviet undergroun art."
State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow
"The work of artists like Valerii Martynchik (b.1948) [...] vibrantly recalls the legacy of Chagall's floating worlds, Filonov's layering of paint surfaces, and Kandinsky's geometrical ording of the most minute shapes. [...] Evoking the balanced measures of Malevich's paintings, the shapes in Martynchik's works are at once centered and weighted while projecting beyond the parameters of the paintings frame. What is most striking about these paintings is thier monumental scale, a particularly bold direction for the late 1970s, when works had to be transported covertly and displayed in clandestine quarters. Martynchik, in particular, played a leading role in organizing the Belarus underground in Minsk. This group emerged in 1987 under the name 'Forma,' which has now allowed us to recognize the existence of an organized nonconformist movement in Belarus."
Norton Dodge Collection Catalogue: Dissidence in Ukranian Painting.
"Martynchik remains a master of his overabundance and who paints each detail with absolute precision. Although the anthropomorphic part os his art is minimal - are we not details of a universe, which structuresitself without us? One infers from this that man is only one ant in the enormous flood. This realization brings no fear; there is joy and rhythm in the quiverings of this painter, who knows - and is this not rare these days?"
French Academy of Fine Arts
And in the words of the artist:
"For me, my paintings are my inner immigration, into my zone, away from the outer life, in all its roughness, stagnancy, danger and banal simplification. I took refuge from Soviet ideology, which was grey and cynical. I could focus instead on developing my art, to fill in the gaps and be free. I became preoccupied with art itself."