Olga Krykun

Olga Krykun
Letní pomněnky / Літні незабудки / Summer forget-me-nots
Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2022 Exhibition
22 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
Trade Fair Palace, National Gallery, Prague

Olga Krykun is exhibiting a series of paintings stylised through carved wooden frames as windows with a view, set in a spatial installation which will be accompanied by a performance at the opening. Although the new paintings’ subject of anthropomorphic flowers is not fundamentally different from the author’s earlier work, the core of their meaning is notably darker. The work refers to the ongoing and tragic Russian war in Ukraine, which has had a profound effect on Olga Krykun and many other Ukrainian artists living and working in Prague. Krykun views her current work as a means to alert the Western viewer to the real world and as a way of coming to terms with living within it. For this, she employs a woman’s perspective in the broadest sense of the word, working with intuition, emotion and her own experience. The portraits of Ukrainian women as life-sized mannequins and winged drones that straddle the line between toys, weapons and transformations into another animal species capture the contradictions of the present – sadness, fear, hopelessness, but also courage and hope. The work also points to certain aspects of watching and experiencing war online, the paradoxical combination of physical distance alongside the painful details of the images of the ongoing conflict in the media.

Video profile:
YouTube Profil Olga Krykun — CJCH 2022