Untitled 

This Untitled work was made by Tiberiy Szilvashi, but we don’t know when or with what. But we can infer a few things by looking at the canvas. Abstraction entered Ukrainian art in a meaningful way in the 1960s, when artists began to tentatively push against the strictures of Socialist Realism. But it was not until Perestroika, in the late 1980s, that movements like minimalism and conceptualism could be embraced more fully. The institutions of art, however, remained slow to accept these new idioms, so that many abstract artists worked outside the mainstream until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. The nuances of colour in this painting might remind us of Malevich, and we know that Szilvashi admired Malevich, but there’s also something very contemporary in its reductive quality. Art history teaches us to examine the social and institutional conditions that allow an artist to be seen. Without more information on this painting, we can only begin to speculate on its place in the history of Ukrainian art.