Nine Sketches to Compositions 1970

Hryhorii Havrylenko made these nine sketches with ink, imagining and trying out a variety of figure compositions. The raw, energetic lines give the impression that the artist captured these ideas quickly as they came to him. I can imagine him, maybe in a cafe, filling up page after page with similar ideas, each one slightly different from the last. There are groupings of figures, some with a bottle perched on the table, all simplified into curving lines and sharp angles. Then there are details of bodies—maybe torsos?—rendered with the same sensitivity and spontaneity. There's a real connection to Matisse here, particularly in the economy of line and focus on the human form. You can see the artist experimenting with different ways of seeing and representing the world, playing with abstraction and representation in equal measure. It's like he's saying: what can I extract? How can I distill the forms down? Ultimately, these sketches remind me that art is about ongoing exploration, a constant conversation between artists across time and space.