1962 was born in the city of Kharkov, Ukraine.
1979-1984 studied at the Kharkov Institute of Art and Industry (now the Kharkov State Academy of Design and Arts), majoring in “The Artist of Monumental and Decorative Arts.” Teachers A.Hmelnitsky, E.Bykov.
1984-1987 work at the Kharkov Art Industrial Complex. An artist of monumental and decorative art.
1987-1989 Scholarship of the Union of Artists of the USSR.
Since 1988 on creative work.
1989 Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.
1999 received the Medal of Franz Kafka.
Personal exhibitions
2013 “Still-life in the work of Svetlana Kondratenko” gallery “Yana”, Kiev.
2012 May-August. Exhibition of paintings “Children’s fantasies” gallery “Yana”, Kiev.
2011 Personal exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ukraine, Kiev.
2006 The project “13 July” gallery “Triptych”, Kiev.
2004 Exhibition of paintings “Gallery 36”, Kiev.
2004 Painting exhibition “Josef Kalouchek Gallery”, Prague, Czech Republic.
2004 Exhibition of paintings “Love and Death”, gallery of the publishing house “Zadumlivy Ostrich”, Kiev.
Exhibitions
2012 – 2018 Permanent personal exhibition in the gallery “Yana”, Kyiv.
2009 Exhibition “Kyiv Fine-art”, “Ukrainian House”, Kyiv.
2008 Exhibition “Art-Kyiv”, “Ukrainian House”, Kyiv.
1998 Triennale of painting “Kiev 98” “Ukrainian House”, Kiev.
1998 Exhibition “The image of the new Ukraine”, Prague, Czech Republic.
1997 International Art Festival, “Ukrainian House”, Kiev.
1995 Exhibition “Euro-Messe 95”, Weil am Rhein, Germany.
1989 Exhibition “Three generations …” Soviart, Kiev.
1989 Exhibition of Ukrainian artists, gallery “Kulturcentrum Marsvinsholm Ystad”, Sweden.
In the fairy-tale world of Svetlana Kondratenko
“Oh, what unprecedented volatile things are here!” – Alice said crestingly.
The words of the famous English storyteller Lewis Carroll want to illustrate an important feature of the creative manner of Svetlana Kondratenko, her personal poetics, where unreal, fantasy art is freely combined with a metaphysical overtones. But behind this semi-sketchy game and the intonation of the plot-fantasy, it’s easy to guess the strict classical tradition of the school, the disciplined technique of the compositional solution.
In these pictures – dreams for children, there is a special unobtrusive pedagogy, a delicate desire to achieve a childlike manner of expressiveness and intelligibility, to exaggerations, grotesque, gay confusion and confusion in the dimensions and meanings of things. They are so charming – trembling, close to the soul with their exceptional diligence, and at the same time the very touching – captivating “ineptness” of the child, his unsophisticated and pure vision and impression. These scenes involuntarily cause the viewer to recall his first childhood experiences from contact with the larger world.
An arbitrarily interpreted plot, independent of literary descriptiveness, a stylistic move, evokes in memory those works of art in which the masters of the past – I.Bosch, M.Shagal, P.Klee, resorting to phantasmagoria, as a means of expressiveness, have reached a high level of skill And individual poetics. Then the artists in this way, could show the nontrivial essence of the visible world, with its fabulous or inexplicable background.
So in children’s, according to the plot of Svetlana, sometimes there is a parable and a fantasy, a fairy tale, a funny entertainment, and a serious instructor’s instruction. It seems that the artist has an absolute “childish hearing”. The word spoken to the child arises before her artistic view in all the richness of her primary connections, which do not fade and do not lose charm from constant use.
Svetlana herself is a storyteller. Although there were in the literature and
Charles Perrault, and Swift, Andersen, and Lewis Carroll, who created their fabulous worlds, the artist paints her own means of painting, her own story, corresponding to the bizarre logic of her invented heroes. Here there are only her, here and now, caused to life by angels and fairies, animals and children, fruits and plants, and all of them are filled with their own significance. And such a painting has a high degree of perfection. In Dutch, thin, professionally executed, as in the altars of Van Eyck, tender in color, blue and white, warm, kind, floating above reality, and light – in every touch of the brush.
Dmitry Korsun 2012
Svetlana Kondratenko
“Genesis that can be understood is already a language”
G.-H. Gadamer
Each picture of the artist has one unconditional quality – it contains emotional tension and confident illusion of dreams. Sometimes it looks like a heavy threatening mara full of internal contradictions and deep unsolved content, and sometimes – as the witty absurdity of the instincts and moods released on the free will. For important events, there is a kind of invisible infantile game, and for a frivolous game – fake forever the dramatic tension of the mask of the Greek tragedy, as well as its doomed hero and a crowd of choirs who are ready to declare a verse sentence.
The artist of this class of game seems to suggest the idea of the existence of parallel time-space measurements, the flight of characters into parallel projects, and the further elucidation of truth in some other modality.
It flashes like a blue flame over pure pure alcohol, a wild mixture of irony and passionate naivety. The burning issue is also the main problem not only of the art of our time – the problem of the eschatological vision of the world, the problem of lost consciousness, and a man who is confused in his imaginary dimensions, in disturbing dimensions, and then threatened with non-existence. Here, some kind of impudent life and missed mind, like the lush apotheosis, are still bogged down by what is still unclear. The main thing here is to have it all detected loudly and vividly, vividly and snugly, and what is being discussed is a minor issue, because perhaps this is about everything that the artist feels. It just so it has already formed together and sprouted as it is, the only rhizome.
Once Akil Benito Oliva compared modern works of art with the labyrinths, because these works were designed to wander among interpretations as long as possible, as if in a maze, without staying in any one, changing each time their previous opinion. The text should always be hidden text, and then the text is imaginary, and then the third, fourth – text, text. The second text is the displaced similarity of the first, together and separately at the same time. Reading such texts is an arbitrary interpretation game, where “the wisdom of the first text is steadily transformed into a” comedy “of the next” (J.Derid).
The painting by Svetlana Kondratenko is a daring existentialist assumption that human existence is understood as life in the very face of “Nothing,” it is also an alarming awareness of its modern faith – its full freedom from illusions. After all, our vital instinct of “realism” leads us to the naive idealization of the real. It’s just such a natural tendency to “human, too human.” In the case of Svetlana, as well as the whole generation, which appeared in the art of Ukraine in the late 1980s, there was a transformation not to the reality that everything by itself existed under the laws of mechanics “valid, because reasonable” (as expressed by Hegel), But farther and farther beyond the dangerous vignette – to a new form of unreality, which can be called “hysterical sublimation” (the term A. Yakimovich).
Perhaps here was the problem of traumatic experience, which he certainly got “the Cast soviet generation” – in the words of Victor Miziano. The reaction to the collapse of the Soviet ideology was unique in its own way; It was an unexpected social carnival syndrome. He caused in the mass consciousness a social depression, on the one hand, and a ridiculous reflection on the cataclysm of a “non-penetrative system,” on the other. The terrible one has now become obscene and ridiculous – as if in the only one text once again placed two texts.
Irony as an artistic method and an effective means of expressiveness really dominate the art of Svetlana Kondratenko. Even when it depicts a righteous character that crouches the majestic landscape. Even when he is shown as a worthy crown and the summit of creation (picture Noah). Hence, from irony, a special and personal, vibrational texture of the environment in her works comes from – shimmering, anxious, inflammatory, alert, that nobody gives any certainty. And even in the still lifes the sarcastic experience of her generation hid; Surrealistic premonitions quickly overcome the original idyll and admire things with one another. The present “isoboliy” already looks like a visibility and a melting ghost that threatens its own disintegration, and the “acid” vinyl-colored background only amplifies the impossibility of a general nervous rise of such a styllife. As in modern society, where total uncertainty of the content prevails, its still life is not classical, but rather manieristic, because there things and their essences do not look consistently, but somehow in parallel. One view is thrown into the world of sensual reality, and the other – into the world of entities, which is more significant, deep, rare.
Although the artist is primarily plastic, emotional, and the artist can not be a consistent philosopher precisely because he has such a gift of God, a natural tendency. Painting is just a lace, an illusion, a plane. But nevertheless, the truth of the artistic manifestation is higher than the philosophical truth, because no subsequent “theory” of it is in a position to change or overthrow.
Irony as a legitimate artistic reception is present even in the means of expressiveness itself. This is an ironic and barely awkward figure, like a skeleton of the depicted entity, and this figure is deeply shifted to light Brightling shaggy, unexpected grotesque, imperceptible clubbing, grimace, into some kind of “hunting bout”. Like Peter Brueghel, there is a combination of a generalized spontaneous cosmic phenomenon – earth, season, children’s game, proverb – with careful discovery of details. Extremely general and extremely separate here are merged together, as if in a philosophical statement. This is also the Brueghel intonation of the image of the world “inverted”, the theme of obscenity and foolishness, of the human “all sorts of vanity”, which inappropriately conflicts with God’s once given rational and harmonious image of the universe. This irony is also an expression of the fact that the artist is looking for new sensual and aesthetic codes, which appreciates the spontaneity of the expression, the lack of any artificiality, the new organic, which prefers the living vilevatus of the form of all inanimate academic correctness.
Surprisingly, the existence of such painting is imbued with the example of Brueghel, as the only true faith intonation, and “Rossosizm”, as the most honest technique. These qualities are even translated into a background filled with effective pulsating signs of their presence. Slowly dissipated syncopated chaos of incomprehensible meanings.
Because here bunnies-lambs, squirrel-cows announce their existence with a pony psychedelic intonation. They represent whole cycles of dreams and hallucinations, as if they offer riddles without happy discrepancies. Here, the waterfalls do not fall, but they beat ahead and away from tragic cadences, Oleg Holosiya.
And the depicted flowers are huge, threatening, their throbbing erosion, and their direct conflicts with the planet sky of the prehistoric planet lay the graceful catastrophic plane, the chastity of the compositional whole …
Surprisingly, the same qualities of fauna and flora permeate the cycles of works, which depict political scenes – from Napoleon (“Semi-sweet Tilsit”), Ulyanov (Lenin), Brezhnev – to the native, domestic, Ukrainian politicians of the former district committees. Only one important feature is that all these politicians tend to drink something very much. The well-kept and elegantly dressed tables, ready to crack from the creatures that stretch out like the ocean in front of the ship, in front of the people of historical figures – this is the basis, a guarantee of mature and well-considered political decisions that civil society expects from them. The same is a humorous farewell to the glorious “heroic country,” inspired by the Soviet mythologeme, present in the film “Real Pilots”. For here is a majestic, like the Alps, a landscape of “wide native country” and an awesome post-war hybrid jet with jet and piston engines at the same time that it was a curious “candle” over a posing group of pre-war caresses-pilots. Happy true pilots, of course, smile and drink. Figurative chimeras, stylistic hybrids, mythmotants – this is an optimistic fairy tale about the heroic “man of the country of the Soviet Union”. As if continuing the theme of foolishness and the cycle of works “Artist and Model”. This is a paraphrase of the famous Picasso series, where the characters were given an ancient southern calm and a service of high art. Characters of Kondratenko have taken on a duty to myself only a rule above all nothing high to not do. It is rather a theater of absurdity, a quorum of lust, a grotesque, and a “grassroots laughing culture” (M. Bakhtin), where the main characters, the artist and the model, can exist only in comically shifted roles …
The themes of Svetlana Kondratenko’s works, stories and orientation of stylistic features, with all diversity, have a unified universal language. Here again we want to return to the epigraph, which is posed as an overhead ahead of this article about the peculiarities of the world that this artist creates. “Genesis that can be understood …” – and this opportunity to understand life is always left untouched by the right and purpose for a man of art.
Dmitry Korsun </ p>