Background
Karlo Zvirynsky was born on August 14, 1923 in the village of Lavriv, L'vivs'ka Oblast', Ukraine.
Карло Звіринський
Karlo Zvirynsky was born on August 14, 1923 in the village of Lavriv, L'vivs'ka Oblast', Ukraine.
Karlo Zvirynsky studied at the short-lived Lviv Academy of Art in 1943 under Vasyl H. Krychevsky, graduated in 1953 from the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Art, where he studied under Roman Selsky.
Zvirynsky began teaching painting and composition at the Lviv Institute of Decorative and Applied Art in 1953. He taught there until 1979. In addition, for a long time Zvirinsky directed the St. Luke school of icon painting at the monastery of the Order of the Studites in Lavriv, Ukraine.
Being a painter, Zvirynsky experimented with the formal aspects of composition, form, line, texture, and colour. Some of his works of the 1960s parallel the formal achievements of Western abstractionists. He also painted semi-abstract landscapes ("Forest Motif", 1966) and complex still lifes, in which an assortment of objects fill the canvas ("Small Objects", 1982). His numerous collages and relief constructions on panels explore the formal relationships of form and colour.
Zvirynsky died on October 8, 1997 in Lviv, Ukraine.
Quotations:
"One apple in a painting by Cezanne is worth more that the entire art of Socialist Realism."
"Probably, in the life of every person there are people meeting whom influences the whole course of later life. Without them, things would have developed in quite a different way. These people help us see what we have not seen before. Roman Selski looked like a character from a painting by El Greco. The artists and intellectuals who regularly gathered at his apartment talked about modern art practised in the west, which the Soviets condemned as ‘decadent’. Guests explained the latest trends in art, described exhibitions of modern art held in London, Paris and New York. It was exhilarating."