Ukrainian wall painting of the 1960s-1980s: the evolution of the artistic language

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of one of the most paradoxical phenomena of artistic culture of the late Soviet era - monumental and decorative art, which, despite its programmatic socio-political involvement, became part of “Soviet modernism”, combining social utopia with a variety of formal, plastic, stylistic, aesthetic directions, which reflected the search for a new national and individual author’s artistic language and imagery. Significant, that exactly murals and architecture put beginning to the processes of the aesthetic updating, that became the signs of social and political thaw in the USSR. Keeping the main tasks “ of leninist plan of monumental propaganda”, monumental -decorative art in Ukraine grew into a certain “aesthetic niche”, where found a display wide address to reasons of folk art and different aspirations of modernism, and at the same time and development of new withcomposition charts of late Soviet iconography. The evolution of wall painting – from mainly planar and decorative solutions of the 1960s to complex figurative and spatial constructions of the 1970s and 1980s, the expansion of wall painting techniques ( mosaics, frescoes, stained glass windows, sgraffito, mosaic reliefs, encaustics, various types of painting, etc.) reflected the demonstration processes in Soviet art, where through wall painting new images, languages and aesthetics entered the public space, which significantly expanded its official canonical dimensions.