The PinchukArtCentre has been blessed by long lines of visitors since its opening three years ago. Located in the heart of Kyiv across the historical food market Besarabsky, it’s a hive of eccentric creativity.
If tourists frequent the meat and veggie stalls for some 20th century shopping experience, art dwellers, yuppies and critics form an orderly queue in front of the building at Chervonoarmiyska/Baseina 1/3-2, eager to glance at the pithy exhibits from all over the world.
Billionaire Viktor Pinchuk founded his gallery in 2007. Among other reasons, he wanted the title “oligarch” to be replaced with something like “patron” or “philanthropist.” Blessed with audacity and imagination when it came to spreading wealth and leaving a mark, he managed to achieve his goal.
To justify recklessness and procrastination habits, Ukrainians often say that if they are to fall in love, it’s got to be with a queen. And if they gamble, they’ve got to lose a million – no less.
Pinchuk was smarter than your typical die-hard: he married the queen, or at least the princess, the daughter of ex-President Leonid Kuchma, and made billions for years to come. In the turbulent 1990s, when the economy was crumbling, he was bartering juice squeezers for cast iron, and whatever else it took to turn goods into cash. Twenty years on, he was inviting the world’s most expensive living artist Damien Hirst with his famous hanged cow in a puddle of blood to present in his gallery. Besides wheeling and dealing, Pinchuk learned how to shock beyond anything known in the business world.
Belgian artist Jan Fabre explores life and death subjects in his provocative installation, “Fountain of the World as a Young Artist.”
Singers Paul McCartney and Elton John showed off their talents by presenting pictures and photographs in his center. Hurst unveiled his death themes in the Requiem collection there – known to have been his largest exhibit to date.
Aspiring Ukrainian artists regularly find shelter in the spacious white halls of the center with whatever quirky artworks they conceive.
The latest art exhibition, called Sexuality and Transcendence, is splashed across all four floors of the center. It’s an eclectic, if erratic, stream of work from 19 artists, created in the spirit of radical openness. There are objects screaming of sex and desire; while others subtly hint at their potent nature inside.
Three displays have clung to my memory. One is a room of an Asian nurse by Richard Prince on the second floor of the exhibit. She’s no Halloween sleek blond shaking her hips on a dance floor. Photographed in full attire in a room looking like a makeshift hospital, the plump beauty exposes her femininity in close detail. She’s got blood spots on her robe as a sign of her medical routine and yet a posture that breathes sex. Next to her is a neat display of nurse hats. They are modest in comparison to the woman on the photos, but somewhere deep inside they are suggestive and erotic.
Yan Fabre’s installation leaves no one indifferent. You either love it or hate it. Belgian artist Fabre designed a provocative cemetery with a dummy of himself in the center. His manhood – in full combat position – shoots up to the ceiling once every 30 minutes, sending most men fleeing. Women giggle their way out too. Everyone interprets as they please. The title, Fountain of Life, however, suggests that where there is death, there is life – all in line with Sexuality and Transcendence.
Above all, the exhibition is a fun place (I can already hear the critical murmurs.) Among other things, it will tell you the difference between a penis and a bonus, as explained by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami through his work: “You can always get your wife to blow your bonus.”
You might not like the subject or metaphors but no one understood the impressionists when they had just started.
“Balloon Rabbit” is one of the most popular exhibits as seen here during the Night in the Museum event on May 28. American artist Jeff Koons premiered it in Kyiv in April.
I went to the PinchukArtCentre a few times for this exhibition, and would go again. If not for energetic Fabre then for a young hipster crowd that frequents it. In the gallery, there’s a breed of youth who are Ukrainian but also European.
They are inquisitive and global-minded. They want to learn and grow. Sometimes ubiquitous short-skirted dolls with pug dogs and fashion clutches show up near the gallery, but they quickly leave for good.
Critics would say that one can hardly progress in an amoral setting of half-naked photographs of the homeless and their likes. Pinchuk thinks otherwise. In an online chat with Korrespondent.net readers in May, he said it would be hypocritical to deny that modern art is driven by love and sex.
“A new approach to it could be unusual,” Pinchuk said. “Lack of understanding evokes rejection. One can get irritated that he can’t read TV instructions in English or learn a new computer program. But you can actually sit down and work through it if you try. And I am sure that the people who line up in front of our center every day have more of a chance to understand this new world, break its cultural code and decipher its ‘gene of success’.”
Pinchuk’s art team goes out of their way to educate the public about the essentials of modern art and beyond. Visitors are both more discerning and demanding than they used to be, and want explanations. Literary meetings, master classes and vegetarian meals in the local ultra-modern cafe cater to many tastes and also serve this role.
Last week the museum held an unusual event, designed to break out of the stereotypical “9-to-5 working hours” and “no talking in museum” policies. It was open for viewing at night. In a video room, some lay on the carpet floor and listened to poems. In another, a guide in a pajama was interpreting sexuality and transcendence. You could have easily mistaken Kyiv for London or Madrid that night.
There is one installation at the museum that doesn’t require any subtitles. Young couples are engage in a game of seduction, chasing, courting, hugging and kissing each other for two hours. At first sight, it feels like you are intruding, but then this theatrical display becomes so enthralling that you are no longer bothered by watching them. Neither are they. Couples actually competed to take part in this fascinating performance.
Pinchuk’s multiple identities as a pipe producer, a media tycoon and an art patron are not imposed on the center. It’s hard to say whether any particular collection is to his taste or not. Guggenheim-like blank white walls and bankable modern artists speak of one thing – aspiration to modernize and follow the best. Let’s hope the idea leaks through the walls into the streets.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliya Popova can be reached at [email protected].
