ASORTYMENTNA KIMNATA
While Yuriy Izdryk’s literary work is well known to many visitors of the Book Arsenal, his visual art practice often remains in the shadows. Yet Izdryk’s engagement with visual art dates back to the early 1990s—somewhere between the first issues of Chetver, a literary and art magazine (1989–2017) for which he created covers using collage techniques and photocopied the magazine himself, and the 1991 exhibition Provincial Supplement No. 2, which served as an alternative program to the second Impreza Biennale. All of this took place in Ivano-Frankivsk.
Izdryk’s Boxes: An Almost Art Exhibition features primarily works created after russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These include a series of matchbox drawings made during the first long blackouts in late 2022 and early 2023; a sketchbook filled with drawings created in an intensive care unit at the turn of 2023–2024; and a series of collages on cigarette packs created during another wartime winter in 2024–2025. At first glance, these works may appear ironic, at second, self-therapeutic—yet ultimately, they are deliberately indifferent to the viewer’s gaze. The artist casually mixes childlike imagery with terminal states, suprematism with pop culture, flirting only with his own finitude and a self-declared not-knowing. Collage and cut-and-paste are fitting methods for this approach.
A box is something you can easily hide things in—or hide yourself in. It’s easy to carry, easy to disguise: all it takes is writing or sticking something on it that won’t raise suspicion. “No one gets anything, and that’s fucking great,” gleams one of the sketchbook pages, scrawled in red gel pen. That’s exactly how it is, especially in 2024.
BIOGRAPHY
Yuriy Izdryk is an artist, poet, performer, and musician. He was born in Kalush and studied at Lviv Polytechnic National University’s Faculty of Mechanical Technology. He is a Chornobyl disaster liquidator and the founder and author of the Chetver magazine. In 2024, he received the Shevchenko National Prize in the Literature category.
Alona Karavai is a curator, essayist, and cultural manager. She was born in Donetsk Oblast and has worked in Donetsk, Berlin, and Ivano-Frankivsk. She is a co-founder of Asortymentna Kimnata and works with themes of peripheries, absence, and local art communities.
Asia Tsisar is a researcher and curator. She was born in Zaporizhzhia and has worked in Kharkiv, Warsaw, and Ivano-Frankivsk. She curated the Secondary Archive at the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation and co-curated the exhibitions Instant Time (2018) and Between Farewell and Return (2024) at Mystetskyi Arsenal. Since 2023, she has been collaborating with Asortymentna Kimnata on research into local art.