A Note from artist and curator Alla Rogers, allarogersgallery.art — Here we are in this space dedicated to exploring what is merely a splinter, a fragment, of an enormous and ancient culture, the Ukraine, formerly Rus, from which Russia adopted its name and identity.
The human story behind what you see is decades of expression in the form of paintings by artists representing 18 regions of Ukraine and a single collector. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, these artists were trained, schooled, exhibited, and honored in the interior of the Soviet space. These artists grew, and thrived, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, they found audiences , honor, and status in private collections and museums all over the world.
The collector of these works, Maksym Melnyk, from Kyiv, is aoks on art, catalogs, and in the process, he metists himself, collected their work, and amassed a very important cross-section of high-status artists from all of publisher of bo many of the art Ukraine, some of whom are no longer living.
Maksym’s response to the invasion and his witnessing the trauma of war in children, particularly, and his countrymen in general, motivated him to draw from his collection in order to help them. He chose some of his most precious pieces.
Giving them up as well as purchasing them is a true act of kindness and support on a purely human level. This exhibition was created and traveled across war-torn Ukraine, under missile barrages, and passed through the caring and freedom-loving hands of handlers in a chain of volunteers that allowed the crates to crosso a plane to NYC and driven to Washington, into Poland and then loaded ont DC,three days before the opening date.
WHAT IF THIS WERE US?
What if our, land, our homes our museums: The Met, The Phillips around the corner , the Guggenheim and countless private collections, what if our culture were being destroyed by bombs and missiles and a campaign of genocidal barbarity requiring appeals to our international courts of justice. The looting of art and the destruction of cultural patrimony in Ukraine is even greater than the looting that took place under the Nazi occupation in WWII. The statistics are all there, recognized by world commissions and governments.
Under threat and future scarcity the value of a cultural object increases in its fundamental significance regarding who created it and what important content and even technique and craft it contains and contributes to world culture and of course its potential value
THE WAR WILL END
And then what, restoration, rebuilding of society, infrastruction, homes, hospitals , schools, museums, businesses. Mueums and the art spaces of Ukraine will need to be repopulated with its own patrimony. It will come from within Ukraines own resilient art community and the artists who are no long er with many of whom are in this collection will hold a place of honor. In some small way we can be part of this beautiful cycle of history that these and other works represent.