Underground art

Underground art is a notion first associated with the cultural phenomenon of the 1960s and early 1970s, when groups of creative individuals were seen as existing outside or on the fringes of popular, commercial and official culture. The underground brought together independent presses, experimental film, music, poetry and visual practices that circulated beyond institutional channels and often had a markedly rebellious, countercultural character. In countries under totalitarian control the term acquired a distinctly political charge: unofficial art was made in secret, outside censorship and state-run unions, and its makers faced persecution. In Soviet-era Ukraine there existed a powerful nonconformist underground of artists who worked beyond permitted canons, staged apartment exhibitions and preserved freedom of expression despite repression. This tradition of unofficial art became an important foundation for the development of independent Ukrainian culture after the country regained its statehood.