New Wave / Transavant-garde

The New Wave (the Ukrainian Transavant-garde) was an explosion of young nonconformist art in Ukraine of roughly 1987 to 1999, coinciding with the era of Perestroika, the collapse of the USSR and the achievement of independence. The term "Transavant-garde" derives from the concept of the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva, who used it to name a return to grand, emotional, figurative painting after Conceptualism; on Ukrainian soil it acquired its own rebellious ring. The key idea of the era was a radical liberation from ideological and aesthetic prohibitions, an ironic reworking of the Soviet and classical heritage, corporeality, myth-making and a monumental, often expressive large-format painting. The hearth of the movement was the Kyiv squat on Paris Commune Street, where young artists lived and worked. Its signature figures were Arsen Savadov and Heorhiy Senchenko, whose canvas "The Sorrow of Cleopatra" (1987) became the manifesto of a generation, together with Oleg Golosiy, Oleksandr Hnylytsky, Vasyl Tsagolov, Dmytro Kavsan and Yuriy Solomko. Their art fused pathos with play, post-totalitarian freedom with postmodern quotation, restoring scale and sensuality to painting. In the late 1980s the first independent centres also emerged in Kyiv, such as the Soviart gallery (1987), which brought the nonconformists before the public. By the end of the 1990s the turbulent neo-expression of the New Wave was gradually supplanted by conceptual, photographic and video practices, which prepared the language of mature contemporary art. The New Wave brought Ukrainian art out of the underground into the public and international arena, forming the first generation of free artists of an independent state. This turbulent, brief era closed the Soviet age and directly prepared the institutional coming-of-age of contemporary Ukrainian art in the decades that followed.