Biography
Vasiliy Ryabchenko was born on July 23, 1954, in Odesa in the family of a Soviet graphic artist Sergey Ryabchenko. [4]
His art education started in 1966 at the Odesa Art School located on the territory of the Odesa Art College. In 1969, he entered the painting department of the Odesa Art College which was named after M. B. Grekov.
1974 - 1976 he was auditing courses at the Leningrad Higher School of Art and Design named after Mukhina in Leningrad. After returning to Odesa, he acquainted and made friends with Valentin Khrushch and others who would be known as the Odesa "nonconformists". [5]
From 1978 to 1983 Vasiliy Ryabchenko studied at the South Ukrainian State Pedagogical University named after K. D. Ushinsky at the art and graphics faculty, where his teachers were Valery Geghamyan and Zinaida Borisyuk. [6]
Since 1987 – a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR, later the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. [7] During this period, a group of artists from Odesa appeared: Sergey Lykov, Elena Nekrasova, Oleksandr Rojtburd, Vasiliy Ryabchenko. Known as the “Odesa Group”. In the late 1980s, this group, which was not very popular among "official" environment of the Union of Artists and wasn’t connected with the unofficial environment – these new "nonconformist", held two major high-profile exhibitions "After Modernism 1" and "After Modernism 2" in the space of a state institution, the Odesa Art Museum. The themes, plots of works, and large-scale formats marked the beginning of a new direction in the fine arts of Odesa. This period included paintings from Vasiliy such as: "Coast of Unidentified Characters" (1989), "Red Room" (1988), "Victim" (1989), "Death of Actaeon" (1989), Diptych "Catchers" (1989), "Method of Temptation" (1990) and others.
In between the two above-mentioned exhibitions, an exhibition, "New Figurations", was held at the Odesa Literary Museum, in which, young artists from Kyiv were involved. [8] This was the beginning of the integration of the "Odesa Group" into the context of the all-Ukrainian art movement that was a current trend at that time. [9] Vasiliy Ryabchenko's works which were displayed at that exhibition were: "Rejection of Grace" (1988) and "Love - not Love" (1988).
Vasiliy Ryabchenko, was among the first who started working in the genre of installation, and his very first work in this direction was "Swings for Stumps", for a project "Steppes of Europe" at the Ujazdowski Castle (1993), curated by Jerzy Onukh. [9] Later on, he created a great number of installations: "The Great Bambi" (1994), "Dedication to Madame Recamier" (1994), "Princess" (1996), "Academy of Cold" (1998), and others.
Since the early 1970s, the artist was constantly experimenting with photography. [10] At first, the main subjects were non-staged, still lifes from everyday objects. He followed that by photo fixation of improvisations involving different objects and the human body. In which he used “emptiness” and asymmetry, which was characteristic of the Eastern tradition. [5] He used this style for a series of photographs, which were put together in the project "Naked Dream" (1995). For this project Vasiliy Ryabchenko received an award along with the title of "Best Artist of Ukraine" according to the results of the first all-Ukrainian art festival "Golden Section" in 1996. In the same year he founded a creative association "Art Laboratory". [2]
