About event
On the eve of Lesya Ukrainka’s birthday, our Museum once again hosts exhibitions of talented and extraordinary women. This year, the tradition is carried forward by Iryna Kirshyna—a set designer, painter, decorative artist, and member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
This exhibition was originally scheduled for February 2022 but had to be postponed due to the start of Russia's aggressive invasion of our country. However, there is a symbolic significance in the fact that it is happening now—amidst war, grief, and bloodshed, Iryna’s works offer us warmth, light, and hope.
Born in Kyiv, the artist graduated from the Taras Shevchenko Republican Art School in 1982 and the National Academy of Arts (now the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture) in 1992. Her mentors were exceptionally talented artists and masters of pedagogy—D. Lider, O. Poderviansky, and O. Burlin. From them, she inherited a profound painterly culture and freedom of artistic expression. Yet, like every gifted creator, Iryna found her own unique path, where her personal and professional abilities fully blossomed: she became a distinctive artist of decorative arts, specifically in the field of textiles.
Her panels captivate with a variety of textile textures and volumes, unexpected color juxtapositions, and incredible imagination in storytelling. For Iryna Kirshyna, textile has become a co-author, an inspiration, and the perfect medium for her ideas, understanding the finest nuances of her creative nature. This is especially true of vintage textiles, which already possessed a life story and were part of someone else’s inspired labor before meeting the artist. Perhaps this juggling of materials and technical methods conceals another of the artist's characteristics—the presence of theatrical play in the creative process, from the initial concept to its realization in color, line, and form. All of this is underpinned by a refined artistic taste, an impeccable sense of style, and a personal harmony that, in its perception of reality, borders on the "naïve" style of the great primitives.
This combination imbues Iryna’s works with extraordinary appeal, making them deeply associative, expressive, and sensual. This is particularly evident in her textile reminiscences of the art history of France, which became her second home. The diffusion of Ukrainian folk art and high-art royal tapestry manufactories, the romanticism of our people’s visions of beauty, and the refined aesthetics of troubadours and minstrels—this is what makes the artist unique and each of her works self-contained and incomparable.
