UKRAINIAN PAVILION
54th INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION/ LA BIENNALE di VENEZIA
June 4, 2011 – November 27, 2011

Preview: June1-3, 2011

Venue: CHIESA DI SAN FANTIN, Sestiere San Marco, Venice
Organizers: FEDOROVA CULTURAL FOUNDATION and CHANGE PERFORMING ARTS
In collaboration with Modern Art Research Institute, Kyiv
With support of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Ukraine

Curators: Achille Bonito Oliva, Oleksiy Rogotchenko
Commissioner: Viktor Sydorenko

Artist: OKSANA MAS
Project: POST-vs-PROTO-RENAISSANCE

Art is the attempt to mend a bereavement, the loss of completeness and the descent into a partial and fragmentary world. In this regard, creation is the development and healing process of the artist who uses form as the crystal-clear evidence of a newfound wholeness. The sphere is the emblem of a circularity that flows and brings together, as shown in the history of art, which, ever since the Middle Ages, has always combined reason with instinct, rationality with spirituality. For several years now, Oksana Mas has been working on reclaiming the sphere as a geometric shape holding within itself a principle of universal oneness. The artist starts from the krashenki Ukrainian folk custom: wooden eggs covered in traditional decorations celebrating Easter. She gave the eggs, incarnation of the sphere, to inmates in women’s penitentiaries, intellectuals and people working in various fields from forty-two different countries asking them to paint them.

The installation by the title Post-vs.-Proto-Renaissance presented at the Biennale di Venezia in the Pavilion of Ukraine is a section of the monumental work (m.92X134), composed by 3.640,000 wooden eggs. The iconographic reference is the work of the Van Eyck brothers, proto-Renaissance artists who painted “The gardens of paradise”, which can be seen on an altar in the Flemish city of Ghent. The eggs form a veritable architecture whose structure evokes a mosaic in which the eggs’ iconographic tattoos constitute the single elements. Ancient and modern art merge into an image embracing stories of sins and dreams of redemption, hope in the future and a yearning for purity. Depending on the distance, the work breaks down as if it were a digital file of egg-pixels, each one representing the dramatic destiny of mankind. Contemplating the work of Oksana Mas is a form of initiation into a new life, a full life.

OKSANA MAS

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