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Tower of Babel

Myroslav Yahoda

Basic information

ID: Ж-7820
Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Name: Tower of Babel
Date of creation: 1997
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions: 130 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

"Tower of Babel" is dated 1997 – just like the canvas "Man and God". Together, they belong to the same cycle as "Religious Figures", "Island of Fish" and "Veil of Veronica" (1998), revealing the mature period of the artist's oeuvre, dedicated to sacred themes reinterpreted through the prism of a personal, almost intimate experience of a liminal state.
Compositionally, the canvas is constructed according to the logic of a gaze from an unknown eminence. The deep, rich cobalt-blue space is interspersed with flashes of red and white brushstrokes resembling falling meteorites, comets or a specific starry sky. Bereft of any astronomical specificity, this visual space conveys a state of cosmic anxiety rather than a classical landscape.
In the upper part, which dominates the entire composition, towers the structure itself – a multi-tiered greyish-white spiral that narrows at the top to a sharp spire, resembling stairs or a snail shell coiled around its axis. At the bottom, the building transitions into a massive circular base with dark window openings and a small doorway, the colour of which is marked by an intense dark red pigment that sharply contrasts with the cold tones of the rest of the canvas. Slightly above the entrance is a striking surrealist detail – a large image of an eye (an allusion to the iconographic concept of the "All-Seeing Eye" or Eye of Providence), embedded into the wall of the building at a level where a window would normally be located. Such a motif can be interpreted as a sign of divine surveillance over human architectural ambitions. The eye, observing man's attempt to reach the heavens, hints at the finale of the biblical story from the Book of Genesis about the confusion of tongues and the scattering of peoples as a punishment for pride.
In front of the tower, in the lower half of the canvas (on both sides and in the centre of the composition), three white angelic figures are placed like columns or pillars. These vertical, elongated figures in white and yellow robes are depicted with their hands lowered or folded in prayer, and with frozen faces devoid of distinct emotions. Their static, column-like regularity contrasts with the dynamics of the rippling flow running between them – a light blue, almost phosphorescent river or stream. It meanders from the foot of the tower to the foreground of the painting, dividing the composition down the centre while simultaneously connecting the heavenly with the earthly.
In this same lower register, the space is saturated with small decorative elements: concentric circles and rings of yellow, white and dark colours, resembling eyes, bubbles or cosmic bodies scattered on a dark blue background alongside reddish brushstrokes of grass or flame. It is worth emphasising that the lower strip is the most abstract part of the painting. It does not lend itself to an unambiguous formal reading, but rather creates the impression of a magma-like, vibrant space of the earth from which the tower rises.
Iconographically, the artist draws upon the classical subject of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) but significantly transforms it. Traditional European compositions – from the miniatures of medieval manuscripts to the philosophical interpretations of Pieter Bruegel the Elder – usually depict the tower as a massive, semi-ruined or unfinished structure surrounded by the clamour of builders, emphasising collective human labour and its futility. Myroslav Yahoda, on the contrary, completely obliterates the presence of people in terms of active construction: there are no workers, scaffoldings or the chaos of incomprehensible tongues. Instead, the building emerges as a completed, serene, almost dreamlike and spectral structure watched over by the Sleepless Eye and surrounded by silent angelic guardians. Such a shift in emphasis – from the drama of construction to its aftermath, the silence after (or perhaps before) the catastrophe – is characteristic of the artist's general logic. The artist views the sacred narrative not as a chronological history, but as a frozen, timeless image of a liminal state.
In the context of the entire 1997–1998 series, "Tower of Babel" continues the line established in the canvas "Man and God", namely – the theme of distance and tension between human ambitions and the divine order. However, it shifts this theme to the register not of direct confrontation (such as the axe raised to the face of Jesus Christ), but of a silent, nocturnal waiting, where the very architecture of sin is already realised and forever frozen under the gaze of an eye that never closes.

Legal regulation

Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Tower of Babel

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