Arco has reopened its doors, and it is the closest thing to how the art world looked and felt before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. In the corridors the excitement typical of the best of times reigns and it seems that the crowd of collectors, artists, curators and celebrities is advancing determined to shelve the crisis. From their stand at Ifema, the gallery couple formed by Max and Julia Voloshyn contemplate them in silence among black sculptures and posters of Stop Putin, Decolonize Russia or Gas embargo Russia. The Voloshyn, which until the start of the war was an avant-garde space in the historic center of Kiiv, is the only Ukrainian gallery at the Madrid art fair and its presence momentarily returns to reality a market willing to shake off its ghosts with a checkbook
As one of those cruel ironies of fate, Julia and Max Voloshyn opened their gallery in Kiiv in 2016 in a historic six-story building with a semi-basement that had served during World War II as an air-raid shelter for the population to protect themselves from German attacks. The same day of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, the artists who had exhibited in their rooms and their families recovered that function. Listening to the missiles fall around them, they were creating artists such as Nikita Kadan, whose works speak of an endlessness and the historical events that preceded it, culminating in a banner that initially hung on the facade of the Secession gallery in Vienna: “FUCK WAR”.
In another of the series, he shows a plowed field with a human figure, as if the ground absorbed the bodies and all that was left behind was a shadow on the surface. It cannot be hidden or deleted. The artist was inspired by hundreds of photographs showing corpses partially covered by earth, explosion craters from missiles and bombs, and hastily dug mass graves on the outskirts of cities and towns.
Max and Julia Voloshyn, the gallery owners, were surprised by the war outside Ukraine. They had left in the fall of 2021 for professional business in Spain and Miami, and have not returned. “We decided to stay abroad because we have a young daughter and it seemed dangerous to us, and if we went back, they would most likely have forced me to join the army,” says Max Voloshyn. They now work from Miami and New York. The works that have been brought to Madrid were evacuated from the Ukraine and brought by road, others were produced abroad. “Most of the galleries in Ukraine are closed, but our intention is to reopen in March, although we will run it from outside,” they add, between surprised and grateful for the media attention.
Mykola Ridnyi has also dyed a large sculpture in black, More Flags, which reproduces various government buildings, markets, apartment blocks… All of them are crowned with a flag, a symbol that in times of war assumes ambivalent meanings, in the opinion of the artist, from a symbol of solidarity to national identification and security to that of occupation and direct threat. Also a target, if you look at it from a military perspective. But the black paint blurs everything and what’s left is the feeling of scorched earth.
