The exhibition with the eloquent title “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900–1930s” has been successfully working for the third year in a row to recognize Ukrainian culture and establish justice for it. This exhibition project, first presented at the National Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid (Spain) in the fall of 2022, will open in another iconic museum in Europe - the Vienna Belvedere.

The opening day - February 23, 2024 - was not chosen by chance. The exhibition, which affirms the original Ukrainian culture as a full-fledged and integral part of the European one, was exhibited at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne (Germany), in the halls of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. In the second half of 2024, a unique exhibition is expected in the UK and Bulgaria. This exhibition project received the prestigious art prize Apollo Magazine Awards 2023. This is the first time that a Ukrainian exhibition has been awarded such a high-level award..

In 2022, Ukrainian works of art for the first time covered a distance of almost 4 thousand. km from Kyiv not only to present our powerful art, but also to protect it from Russian barbarians. According to the latest official data from the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, at the beginning of February 2024 there are about 2 thousand. cultural infrastructure facilities were damaged or destroyed due to full-scale Russian aggression. In particular, more than a hundred museums were damaged.

The stronger the pressure on Ukrainians and the more powerful the enemy’s attempts to deny our existence, primarily Ukrainian culture and history, the more persistently we must defend what justly and legally belongs to us. And intelligently, but persistently and loudly declare yourself at all levels.

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So, a powerful exhibition, the heart of which is more than 50 works from the collection of the National Art Museum of Ukraine and five other museums, private collections, fulfills a cultural and diplomatic mission at a high level. One of the organizers of the exhibition project, General Director of the National Art Museum, Yulia Litvinets, is sure: “It is extremely important for Ukraine right now to convey as much information about itself to the world as possible.”. We started preparing this exhibition at the idea level with art critic, famous art curator Konstantin Akinsha in March 2022, when the big war had already begun. They intended to present to Europe the works of Ukrainian artists that were created at the beginning of the twentieth century and, according to criminal decisions, were subject to destruction, like their creators, because the Soviet government defined them as works of formalists, nationalists and enemies of the people.”.

In the capital of Austria, the exhibition “At the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900–1930s” will be on display until June 2, 2024. An expanded exhibition will be presented in Vienna, practically two projects - Ukrainian modernism and secession. This approach will allow us to present a more complete picture of the development of Ukrainian art from the end of the 19th century to the 30s of the 20th century.. “Ukraine, with its art, asserts its natural Europeanness, the synchronization of Ukrainian artists with the European environment,” emphasizes Yulia Litvinets. The same artistic movements and trends prevailed in Ukraine as elsewhere in Europe.. Our exhibition project demonstrates Ukrainian futurism, cubo-futurism, avant-garde, secession"

The exhibition is based on works by such artists as Mikhail Boychuk, Alexandra Ekster, Kazimir Malevich, David Burliuk, Vasily Ermilov, Alexander Bogomazov, Vsevolod Maksimovich, Vasily and Fedor Krichevsky, Alexander Murashko, Georgy Narbut, Mikhail Zhuk, Abram Manevich, Elena Kulchitskaya and others.

This exhibition, in addition to its cultural, diplomatic, educational mission, also serves as an antidote - an antidote to Russian propaganda, its culture, which, like a vampire, has been fed by our culture for centuries, appropriating its best examples, our brightest creators. Because, as rightly noted by one of the initiators of this exhibition of Ukrainian painting, patron of the National Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Baroness Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, in a commentary to the Associated Press: “Every day it becomes more and more clear that Putin’s war against Ukraine is not only about seizing territory,.

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An important component of this exhibition project is that each museum that hosts a Ukrainian exhibition, if it has paintings by Ukrainian artists of this period in its collections, adds works by Ukrainians to the exhibition. How it happened in Madrid, Cologne, where paintings by the Ukrainian futurist, one of the most radical experimenters of the early avant-garde Vladimir Burliuk or the “Amazon” of the Ukrainian and European avant-garde Alexandra Ekster were found - without an emphasis on Russianness, as has been the case for decades. With the beginning of aggression against Ukraine, Western museums are reviewing their collections and changing information about artists and works in scientific passports. These are steps that Ukrainian culture has long been waiting for;

Ukrainian experts pushed their Western colleagues to take them..

The 2024 Stellar Exhibition will continue to travel around the world. After Vienna, the project will be divided into two separate exhibitions: modernism will go to London, namely to the Royal Academy of Arts, Secession? to Bulgaria.

The first exhibition of the landmark project at the National Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, where the first European presentation took place, can be found here.