21 September 2025
(Valeriy Basanets. PHOTO: Intent/Natalia Dovbysh)
A personal exhibition of the artist and sculptor Valeriy Basants opened at the Odesa National Art Museum.
According to the organizers, this event was the first personal exhibition of this artist in many years and was planned back in 2018, but was postponed first due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and then due to the full-scale Russian invasion.
Valerii Basanets recalled that Oleksandr Roitburd, who headed the museum, offered to exhibit his works at the Odesa Art Museum during his lifetime, but then the war broke out and, like everyone else, the artist's life changed and he considered it immoral to be creative for some time, but then he visited another artist's exhibition, saw a large number of viewers, and realized that despite the war, people need art and communication, so he agreed to hold his own personal exhibition.
Valerii Basanets is a Ukrainian painter and sculptor who was born in the Lviv region in January 1941. He has been a member of the Union of Soviet Artists of Ukraine since 1970. One of the active participants of the Odesa underground non-conformist movement, a regular exhibitor of "apartment" exhibitions and one of the founders of the National Association of Artists in 1993. In 1960, he joined a group of young informal artists. In 1993, he became one of the founders of the Choven group, and in 1998 he was one of the founders of the Mamai creative association.
Silence in the works of Valeriy Basants is the embodiment of solitude, an invitation to recollection, a way to reveal archetypal human traits and feelings. In calm self-absorption, the author creates a rosary of images that communicate with each other, being on the verge of disappearing, melting.
The works are kept in Odesa and Khmelnytskyi art museums, Odesa Literary Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Odesa Center for Culture of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, so, according to the organizers, there could have been more works at the exhibition, but because of the war, some museums were unable to provide their exhibitions.
Кирило Бойко