For Olena Turyanska, the project “The Beauty of the Everyday” is an attempt to understand the world of Olena Kulchytska and to explore the creative method of an artist who is important to her. For us, it is a unique opportunity to enter a kind of magical space of art and experience its incredible possibilities. In this space, Olena Turyanska’s artistic practices allow her not only to stand alongside Olena Kulchytska, observing her, but also to interact and co-create this space together.

I look at a narrow street in one of Italy’s small towns, bathed in warm sunlight, at a tree in bloom, at the leaning fence of a rural courtyard, I look at a snow-covered park in Lviv, an old woodshed, an open city gate; I look at the water, the cobblestones, the wall; I see trees, branches, roots, stones... Olena Turyanska noticed all of this; these are all the artist’s ordinary, everyday observations, her “found objects,” later intricately recreated/created from sheets of paper. Yet it is impossible to shake the thought that these places and things, this light and shadow, this angle, line, and compositional technique, remind one of someone—someone who has already been here, someone who has already seen this, and who also noticed and preserved this beauty for us. 

It is some elusive sign of Olena Kulchytska’s presence, as if she were walking those same paths. She, too, searches, stops attentively, captures, and later recreates/creates that beautiful everyday life on paper using various techniques. And somehow, in this project, I can’t bring myself to write about Kulchytska in the past tense. 

It seems that Ivanna Fedorovych-Malytska once wrote about the “sensitive, yet unsentimental nature of the artist” Olena Kulchytska. Mykola Voronyi added: “No ostentation or showiness, nothing superfluous or garish—elegant simplicity, rational taste, and a subtle aesthetic sense of European culture, and at the same time—a unique, national one—arose here somehow on their own—from an organic need, from the tribulations of practical life.” Rereading these lines, I wonder—is this about Kulchytska, or about Turyanska? And I feel gratitude that Turyanska speaks of Kulchytska, and Kulchytska of Turyanska, with the simplicity and clarity characteristic of both. 

Maria Tsymbalista