The Dukat Art Foundation, together with Shum Art Gallery, presents Village–City–Sky, an exhibition of works by Lviv artists Petro and Andrii Humeniuk.
The life experience of artists Petro and Andrii Humeniuk is inseparably connected with the spaces that define the exhibition Village – City – Sky. They were born into a family of dissidents: their father spent twelve years in Soviet camps, and their mother seven. This experience was not conveyed as a story or a legend, but existed as the background of everyday life, shaping the inner space of the family.
The brothers spent their childhood in the village of Lisnevychi in the Lviv region, in a house with a large garden. It was an environment where memory and freedom were not opposed to one another, but coexisted in ordinary gestures and children’s games. While other children played “ours and the fascists,” they invented their own plots — “Moskals and Banderites” — where, under the guise of play, they recreated a historical confrontation in which the occupier was an enemy, not a liberator. It was here that the village became for them not an image of the past, but the first space for making sense of reality.
Their school years were spent in Lviv, which gradually revealed itself as another dimension — complex and multilayered. While preparing to enter art school, Petro, and later Andrii, through the mediation of Ivan Ostafiychuk, became students of the artist Volodymyr Loboda. This period shaped not only their professional direction, but also their way of seeing the inner connections between the real and the symbolic. The brothers entered the Lviv artistic milieu as artists closely associated with the name of their teacher; however, their names soon came to be linked not with their mentor, but with a distinctive artistic language and inner freedom of their own.
The graphic works of Petro and Andrii Humeniuk are united by a shared focus on the interaction between memory, everyday experience, and that which usually remains unnoticed. Within the exhibition, these dimensions are outlined through three spaces — village, city, and sky — which are not separated from one another, but constantly intersect.
In these graphic works, the village appears as an environment in which experience is formed. It is not an image of the past or a generalized symbol, but a space of daily actions, habits, and ways of engaging with the world. Cultural continuity is present here without emphasis: it reveals itself in details, intonations, and in what seems natural and requires no explanation.
The city occupies a special place in the exhibition. It refers above all to Lviv, shown not as a set of iconic landmarks, but as a space of life. The graphic works feature streets, courtyards, interiors revealed to the viewer through windows or doors, fragments of architecture, chance encounters, and scenes of everyday life. The city here is neither fixed nor ordered — it is composed of movement, observation, and people’s interaction with their environment. Architecture does not dominate, but coexists with the inhabitants, shaping the rhythm and atmosphere of the urban space.
In these works, the sky is not separated from the earthly. It is present everywhere — in urban scenes, in everyday gestures, in fragments of architecture. Angels, saints, celestial figures, and symbolic images appear alongside ordinary situations, complementing them. The sacred is not opposed to reality, but enters it as a natural component, emerging in city scenes, gestures, and details. The heavenly does not descend from above, but quietly coexists with the human, revealing itself in the very rhythm of being.
The exhibition Village – City – Sky presents the everyday as a single space without clear boundaries, where the village flows into the city, the city into the sky, and the sky remains present in each of these dimensions.
Text: Roman Turkalo
The exhibition will run from May 26 to June 26.
Dukat Art Foundation Gallery
5 Volodymyrska Street, Kyiv
Opening hours: Monday – Sunday, 11:00–19:00
Admission is free.