Oksana Stratiychuk

Loyal fans of Oksana Stratiychuk’s works are already familiar to the themes of plants, herbs, vegetables and fruits of all sorts that regularly appear in her art and serve as a likeably immense source of inspiration for Oksana’s graphic pieces. Her first flower bouquets emerge on paper in the late 1990’s. After a while the artist smoothly shifts her focus from mixed compositions of plants, fruits and human bodies towards the genre of floral still life in the mood of the Old Dutch school. The Baroque splendor of her bouquets subsequently changes into a refined elegance of the Japanese gardens. Juicy, almost material, and obtainable flowers and fruits give way to the symbolic plants, artistic generalizations of a flower, designed solely for esthetic and philosophic contemplation.

“Window into the Luxembourg Garden” is a new series of prints by the Ukrainian graphic artist Oksana Stratiychuk. This series allows its viewers to take a glimpse at the world of the ragman artists living in the beginning of the XXI century. Her new prints arise from a wonderful mixture of artistic methods and approaches: symbolic details adjoin the purely decorative ones, handmade paper is used together with some ordinary materials, complicated print is supplemented by the photocopies. Frumpy characters and hunker faces from the old French magazines, postcards and photos found on the flea markets of Paris, Kyiv, and Krakow come back to life in Oksana’s prints.

Born and bred in Kyiv, Oksana Stratiychuk has never been to Africa nor could she have experienced life at the beginning of the twentieth century: she is simply too young. And yet, from her pictures you get the feeling that she somehow misses both Africa and the poetic decadence of the Art Nouveau era. True, she would not agree with this analysis. She prefers the term «Viennese Fantastic Realism», but I think this is just a more picturesque way of saying «Art Nouveau».