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Field Road

Zenovii Flinta

Basic information

ID: Ж-5830
Author: Zenovii Flinta
Name: Field Road
Country: the Ukrainian SSR
Culture: Contemporary times
Technique: tempera painting
Material: canvas tempera
Dimensions: 100 x 80 cm (height x width)

Additionally

Type: painting
Genre: landscape
Plot: Landscape

Information about author

Author: Zenovii Flinta
Artist's lifetime: 1935–1988
Country: Poland, the Ukrainian SSR
Biography: Zenovii Flinta (1 September 1935, Toky village – 2 April 1988, Lviv) was a Ukrainian ceramicist, painter, and graphic artist. Member of the Ukrainian Union of Artists, Honoured Artist of the UkrSSR. He was born in the village of Toky, Ternopil region. After graduating from a seven-year school, he entered the Ivan Trush Lviv School of Applied Arts, Department of Decorative Painting. He graduated in 1959. In 1959–1963, he studied at the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts, Department of Art Ceramics. From 1963, he taught at the painting department of the Ivan Trush Lviv School of Applied Arts. From 1965 to 1975, he worked as a teacher of ceramics at the Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts. In 1967, he interned at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1968, at the Warsaw, Krakow and Wroclaw Academies of Fine Arts. From 1970, he worked at the Lviv Ceramics and Sculpture Factory. In 1971, he headed the decorative and applied arts section of the Lviv branch of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts. Since 1960, he has participated in Republican exhibitions and, since 1968, in all Union exhibitions. He participated in the International Biennial of Ceramics in Faenza (Italy, 1973) and Vallauris (France, 1974). In 1982–1983, there was a successful group exhibition of Zenovii Flinta, Oleh Minko, and Liubomyr Medvid in Lviv, Kyiv, and Vilnius. In 1985, a solo exhibition of Z. Flinta's works was held in Lviv, including paintings, graphics, and ceramics. Conceptually and plastically, many of Z. Flinta's paintings are inspired by the works of P. Cézanne, P. Picasso, G. Braque, O. Archipenko, F. Léger, H. Matisse, and the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1930s. The movement of the sixties, Roman Selskyi and Karlo Zvirynskyi, had a significant influence on his creative search. Many of Z. Flinta's paintings are characterised by allegorism and the revelation of deep philosophical meanings through visible objects, forms, and colour combinations. In painting, the artist preferred pastels and tempera. In ceramics, he concentrated on the technique of painting to achieve pictorial and graphic effects. The artist's early works are characterised by the use of ornamental motifs from the folk art of the Carpathians. The colour palette is based on a combination of brown, green, and ochre with the addition of black and white.

Object description

Zenovii Flinta's work is colourful and original, based on the assertion of the intrinsic value of art, imbued with philosophical reflections and the search for lasting meanings and full of Post-Impressionist echoes. The figurative system of the "Field Road" work is determined by artistic interpretations of the fields of wheat – symbols of the human life field, and the road – their earthly path. The association of the harvest with the "harvest of life" period gives the landscape a semantic capacity. The clouds emphasise the drama of the picture: swirling and stormy, with glimpses of higher, metaphysically significant light in the vastness of the sky. The interplay between the transitory and the eternal, the earthly and the heavenly, is outlined by the figure of a woman with cows against a background of vast wheat fields. The means used to realise the artistic idea was the development of spherical space, which gave the landscape an epic feel and reflected the whole world in a single fragment of nature. The expression of the idea of the eternity of the cycle of nature was achieved by the Post-Impressionist intrinsic value of the picture plane, the revelation of the essential through the levelling of three-dimensionality, the laconic, restrained colouring based on a combination of white, gold, blue-grey, and olive.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Field Road

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