Yury Kharchenko : Painting 2018 -2022

Displays recent works by a contemporary painter who embraces imagery from pop culture to examine violence, genocide, and history.
 
Painter Yury Kharchenko combines brilliant color with cerebral content to create his own highly individual pictorial language. This book presents and contextualizes his works from the past six years.

A Jewish artist working in a time marked by growing anti-Semitism, Kharchenko’s most recent paintings vehemently assert his existence. While his earlier works largely invoked American abstract expressionism or referred to archaic and mythical symbols, many of his paintings today are characterized by iconography in which pop-cultural ideas and figures are mixed with fantasies of violence and taboo references to the Holocaust. The images raise provocative questions about ethics, guilt, and memory.

Beauty embraces horror – concentrated colours and motifs with depth. Yury Kharchenko is an outstanding representative of contemporary painting. He creates works in cycles which reflect his profound connections with existential themes like darkness and light. He combines masterful colourfulness with dense substance to create a unique pictorial language ranging from the poetic to the strident. This volume illustrates his works from the last six years lavishly, together with knowledgeable texts. In our consumer society, is the culture of remembrance increasingly degenerating into an entertainment park? In a time of growing anti-Semitism and relativisation of the Holocaust, Yury Kharchenko’s latest pictures demonstrate an explicitness and vehemence that are new to his work. He uses the vocabulary of Pop culture, of Disney and Hollywood, which he mixes with fantasies of violence containing taboo references to the Holocaust. The result is an artistic oeuvre which makes us look carefully and aims to galvanise.