Polish Institute in New Delhi in collaboration with the Embassy of Ukraine, the India International Centre and the National Centre for Culture Poland presented exhibition The Ukrainian World of Maria Prymachenko.
The exhibition was on view from 11th to 18th August 2022 at the Art Gallery, IIC Annexe in New Delhi. It was inaugurated by H.E. Adam Burakowski, Ambassador of Republic of Poland and H.E. Igor Poliha, Ambassador of Ukraine on Wednesday, 10 August 2022. After presentation at the ICC, the exhibition was on view at the Ukrainian Embassy in New Delhi.

The Ukrainian World of Maria Pymachenko

The exhibition consisted of digital prints of eleven paintings by Maria Prymachenko (1908-1997), a Ukrainian folk painter, and representative of naive art, who also worked on drawings, embroidery, and painting on ceramics. Selected works, painted in the years 1963 – 1988, present an incredibly colourful world full of fantasy, filled with strange creatures (e.g. black beast), animals (bull), floral motifs (peacock among hops), as well as scenes from fairy tales. Maria Prymachenko’s works are full of folk ornamentations painted using rudimentary water-based paints, such as the so-called ‘tempera for beginners’. It was only towards the end of her life that she could afford to use more expensive and better quality tempera paints.
Maria Prymachenko did not receive any artistic education. She completed only 4 years of primary school and grew up in a family full of creative passions: her grandmother specialized in colouring Easter eggs, her father was an excellent carpenter, and her mother was a craftsman. She drew her ideas from the environment.
The exhibition presented reproductions of Maria Prymachenko’s paintings from the collection of National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art with text by Dorota Pietrzyk.

Examples of the artworks included in the exhibition: