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Religious Figures

Myroslav Yahoda

Basic information

ID: Ж-7816
Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Name: Religious Figures
Date of creation: 1998
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions: 120 x 100 cm (height x width)

Additionally

Type: painting
Provenance: Courtesy of Lviv City Coucil on the 95th anniversary of Lviv Art Gallery

Information about author

Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Artist's lifetime: 1957–2018
Country: Ukraine
Biography: Myroslav Yahoda (23 August 1957 – 12 March 2018) was one of the most consistent and original Lviv artists of the last third of the twentieth – early twenty-first centuries. In his mature period, the artist often deliberately avoided participating in group projects, and the curators who collaborated with him preferred solo exhibitions as a form that allowed the development of an original narrative of his visual world.
He studied at Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Printing Institute (according to Volodymyr Stasenko – graduate of 1987). In his practice, he combined easel painting, graphic and poetic experiments, and turned to scenography, particularly in collaboration with Mariia Veres. Myroslav Yahoda's creative biography spans more than three decades of active exhibition activity: from the first painting exhibitions in Poland and Slovakia in the early 1990s (Lublin, Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Rzeszów, Wrocław, Medzilaborce) to major retrospectives of the 2010s. These include the exhibitions "I + God = A" ("Dzyga" Gallery, 2006), an individual space within the project "Red Book: Soviet Art in Lviv in the 1980s and 1990s" (PinchukArtCentre, 2018), the monumental retrospective "Am I Here – Am I There?!" (Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery, 2019) and the intimate yet emotionally expressive exhibition of the painting "Holodomor" in the Boim Chapel (2016).
It should be emphasised that the paintings and drawings by Myroslav Yahoda defy easy classification, and therefore researchers of the artist's work often use the artist's own neologisms, such as "Chereposlov" (the eponymous title of a 2002 poetry collection), to describe the author's individual optics. Crucial to understanding the artist's artistic cosmogony is the concept of "Distance Zero" (the eponymous title of a 2006 poetry collection) – a state in which a person exists on the boundary between the present and the infinite space of time, without clearly defined points of support, much like Redrick Schuhart from "Stalker" (for details, see http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n89texts/horunzha-dystanciya-nul.htm). The artist himself called this state "cosmic space" – a temporary stay outside the established coordinates of existence. In this sense, he is sometimes compared to Francis Bacon, for whom chance was more important than rational intellect: the images created by such art, in essence, defy mental comprehension in the manner inherent to them. Despite these frequent comparisons of Myroslav Yahoda's practice, the author himself was sceptical of Francis Bacon and believed that he lacked emotionality and humanity, noting the "mechanical" nature of his writing. Instead, he emphasised that for him, what was important in painting was not the finished canvas as a product, but rather the experience – and necessarily a difficult one – during the process of painting.
The early period of the artist's work, traditionally described as the second half of the 1980s and referred to as the "Dark Period", has a resonance with Myroslav Yahoda's expressionist poetry, with its characteristic two- and three-line neologisms, which are variations on a single theme: the human being exists simultaneously in several realities. A recurring theme in Myroslav Yahoda's work is loneliness, not as a psychological state, but as an existential constant that gradually "consumes" the individual and drives a simultaneous search for dissolution and one's own integrity. Researchers of his heritage describe the artist's time as the "Era of Universal Separations" (after Yukio Mishima, with whose translator, Grigory Chkhartishvili, Myroslav Yahoda was personally acquainted), in which true rarity and a miracle is not separation, but reunion.
Myroslav Yahoda's work is inextricably linked to a fundamental rejection of most attributes of modern consumer society, and this distance was for him not something external, but a way of life: the artist consciously distanced himself not only from people, but also from established iconographic and cultural conventions. This is a fundamental difference between his work and the mysticism and visionary style of Jakob Böhme (for details, see https://lvivgallery.org.ua/sites/default/files/verstka_yahoda_optimized.pdf): Myroslav Yahoda's art has a rather post-modernist character, and parallels should be sought not in esoteric traditions, but in the experience of American abstractionism and British expressionism.
The artist's oeuvre is often described in terms of "shocking content" – so sincerely does he work with the body and the boundaries of human existence. At the same time, scholars note that, despite his radical language, Myroslav Yahoda remains an organic artist, unique to Lviv – a city whose "climatic and socio-psychological conditions" contributed to the birth of art that is simultaneously meaningful and hopeless, yet rather apocalyptic in its essence.
Myroslav Yahoda often demonstratively turned to the work of the American musician Tom Waits, whose heavy, "painful" voice serves as an audio parallel to the artist's visual language (which, according to the recollections of colleagues, often served as a constant background in his studio). In the artist's practice, there are also broader philosophical references, in particular, the idea of cultural decline after Auschwitz (after Theodor Adorno), reflecting a definitive reappraisal of the understanding of human nature in the second half of the twentieth century. In one of his interviews (for details, see https://varianty.lviv.ua/publikatsiyi/myroslav-yahoda-ya-stvoryv-svii-svit-i-ya-shchaslyvyi), the artist noted that for years he had practically not left his basement studio and did not even visit the centre of Lviv. This was a conscious choice of seclusion as a condition for creativity, and he named the source of his images as rather the magic, mysticism and energy of Lviv itself, but of that "old" one which, according to the artist, no longer exists (2014). As researchers note: "Often the constructs proposed by the artist in verbal and visual forms so clearly allow one to read the intonations of delirium that it is practically impossible to distance oneself from this impression. However, to reduce everything to the latter would be not only fragmentary but also completely irresponsible. As of today, opinion has the opportunity to fluctuate from acceptance to denial, from recognition to sharp criticism, but what it really is can only be said from a certain distance. The fact is that Myroslav Yahoda lived and worked at a specific time in a specific place; his personal choice became the basis for the specificity of a practice that is rather a phenomenon from the realm of cultural anthropology, and not just creativity. Myroslav Yahoda became the simultaneous director, screenwriter, set designer and main actor of his life, after all, just like any other individual integrated into social life" (for details, see http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n89texts/horunzha-dystanciya-nul.htm).

Object description

"Religious Figures" was created during the mature period of Myroslav Yahoda's work – an artist whose creative path was shaped by the intersection of pressure and a persistent striving for inner freedom. The canvas should be viewed not as an illustration of a specific religious theme, but as the artist's attempt to build his own space of spiritual experience, parallel to the official one – an "ivory tower" to which access was permitted only to a chosen few. Myroslav Yahoda belonged to a circle of artists who, like Fedir Tetianych, Oleh Mitasov and Hennadii Podvoyskyi, operated outside institutional frameworks, and he himself transformed his studio into an ecological niche of personal space.
In "Religious Figures", this is felt in the interpretation of sacred images not as canonical symbols of faith, but as a descriptive definition of the human liminal state, a point where the boundary between mystical illumination and an extreme, almost delusional experience of reality is blurred. The figures on the canvas appear as witnesses to depersonalisation, and the artist transfers religious iconography into the plane of the existential experience of loneliness and the search for support. It is precisely in this that Myroslav Yahoda's affinity lies with the tradition of the Romantics (Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault and Francisco Goya), who also explored states of mental and social marginalisation, seeking to express that layer of human experience which official culture tends to suppress. At the same time, unlike a purely clinical interpretation, Myroslav Yahoda's paintings are not reduced to a symptom, but are a form of sincerity, a correspondence between word and deed, which can be defined as an attempt to "build a world in which a person is happy", as the artist himself puts it.
Compositionally, the figures in the work are devoid of illusory depth and academic anatomical precision, and the emphasised language of deformed, generalised silhouettes, characteristic of the artist, serves to dispel the generally accepted, logical perception of the image. The religious motif here functions rather as an archetypal matrix from which the author's individual mythology emerges. This is a catastrophic but bearable space – an "environment of exiles from paradise", in which the return to the sacred image is simultaneously a path to self-knowledge and the destruction of habitual, comfortable forms of existence.
Importantly, this work does not lend itself to clear interpretation, but balances between affirming humanity's closeness to transcendence and stating a complete separation, a distance between people, which Myroslav Yahoda himself considered a rather conventional category. "Religious Figures" also visualises the two poles that defined the artist's entire oeuvre: Nietzschean loneliness and a constant search for a state that can be defined as freedom, and at the same time a gift and a burden – a form of existence rather than a mere artistic gesture.
The canvas became part of the Gallery's collection as a gift from the Lviv City Council on the occasion of the museum's 95th anniversary, which is a testament to the public and institutional recognition of the work of an artist who, throughout his life, consciously distanced himself from the conformist local cultural environment.

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Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Religious Figures

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