“I always knew that the creative process is like flying, but I couldn’t fly until I found my own way.”
Anatoly Kryvolap, 2011

After working for more than a decade with strict abstraction, painter Anatoly Kryvolap finally found what he sought to convey in his art; it was just outside his studio window in the Ukrainian countryside. His current series, titled "Horse", plays on the contrast of a bucolic agricultural landscape set against the neon colors of contemporary life. There is something both soothing and energizing in these large canvases that speaks to the balance humans struggle to achieve in life. As the artist says, “I want…to live and actually paint what surrounds me in a particular place. It is important for me to preserve the Ukrainian spirit…” (A. Kryvolap quoted in G. Skliarenko, Anatoly Kryvolap: the magic of the disappearing landscape, Anatoly Kryvolap: Landscape, ADEF-Ukraine, Kyiv 2012, p. 6).

An academy-trained painter steeped in the rigors of Soviet realism (he graduated in 1976 from the National Art Institute, Kyiv), Kryvolap quickly rejected officially accepted artistic styles in favor of geometric abstraction. Developing an acute sense of color over the years, the artist has become internationally known for his latest, highly current yet nostalgic reveries on the “bread basket of Europe.” Kryvolap is, not surprisingly, the most successful artist among his Ukrainian contemporaries, in large part due to the path he has taken, finding a home among the abstractionists of the West, but with a uniquely Ukrainian twist.