Presenting Watercolors by Valeriy Skrypka

Skrypka's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.
He melds narrative symbolism and Ukrainian iconography into highly original
works that shed light on universal experience. The figures, animals, birds,
and objects in Skrypka's canvasses speak powerfully of the artist's ability
to create aesthetic harmony, while not flinching from the contradictory
discordant realities of twenty-first century life.

Valeriy Skrypka was born in 1964 in Zaporizhia , Ukraine into a family of
artists. He graduated from the renowned Kyiv Academy of the Arts with a
Master's Degree in art in 1992. The Skrypka exhibition sets the tone for
this exciting new gallery by presenting the powerful works of an artist who
has emerged from Ukraine . Skrypka synthesizes images from his Ukrainian
past with his own perceptions in imaginative and fully realized works of art
that are true to contemporary experience


The figures, animals, birds, and objects, touchstones from Ukraine’s ancient
past and traditions are skillfully blended with the artist’s own original
expressions of contemporary experience. The paintings are strong examples of
the artist’s ability to create aesthetic harmony, while not flinching from
the contradictory discordant realities of twenty-first century life. These
profound and enduring works of art invite the viewer to contemplate the very
nature of existence.
...Skrypka’s aggressive use of paint, in combination with delicate and
ethereal subjects, results in totally original works of art.... Skrypka is a
powerful artist who is among the most original and expressive artists of his
generation...
Sam Hunter, emeritus professor of art history at Princeton University and
former director of The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Rose Art Museum at
Brandeis University , and The Jewish Museum in New York .

Artist's Statement
In my creativity, I aspire to interpret the inconceivableness of the
universe, in which chaos wondrously coexists with the magnetism of an
orderly rhythm. The components of my vision of this universe are fantastic
combinations of its deformed elements. These are definite symbolic markings
for speculating about the mystery of the world, a temptation to contemplate.
The so-called surrealistic stresses of my fantasies are not marshaled to
elicit gothic horror or disgust but rather an idyll, a unity of rhythm and
motion, motion and support. My mythological beings are sphinx-like
mysteries, which everyone interprets in his or her own way, yet none has
solved.  My creativity is a perpetual search for true understanding of the
unfathomable. It is why favorite mythological symbols in my work such as the
apple of paradise, a wondrous bird, and the itinerant gardener, all exist in
perpetual states of metamorphosis.