New Iconography of Lviv III

Seven weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the IconArt Gallery in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv organized a group exhibition for the Lenten season. The title, Waiting for Salvation, captured the mood of fear, uncertainty, and courage mixed with hope among the Ukrainian Greek Catholic artists in the show. The capital of Kyiv did hold out, the Russian advance was halted, and with the nation now on war footing, members of this new school of iconography in Lviv have done their part to uphold morale with stark and stirring images of how the life of the spirit can go on in the most desperate of times.

Two icons from the Lenten show by Kateryna Shadrina beautifully underscored the importance of community in a time of war, contrasting images of a gathering of the faithful and the hopeful. We are Together suggests the anguished followers of Jesus in a prayful huddle in the aftermath of the Crucifixion, which brings to mind photos of Ukrainians seeking shelter in the Kyiv metro during the first weeks of the invasion. Faith in the goodness of God expands into hope for future salvation in The Tree of Life, where the bunched figures become joyous dancers, encircling this evergreen biblical symbol, which appears at the end of the Bible in the vision of the New Jerusalem with leaves available to all “for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:2).”

In a modern spin on the biblical theme of turning swords into plowshares, the Lviv gallery asked 20 artists to create icons on panels taken from ammunition crates for a fund-raising auction in February 2023. In Natalya Rusetska’s ammo-box painting, Attack, now in the collection, a dismantled wood panel and two supports serve as the ground from two contrasting artistic visions. We see the good, green earth created by God and a cosmic nuclear winter brought about by humans waging war. A four winged cherub keeps watch on the boundary between what is and what might yet come, bringing to mind the angel guard placed at the entry to the Garden of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

Before the invasion, Rusetska painted ethereal visions in heavenly realms. Her wartime iconography incorporates shadowy kingdoms of darkness where evil monsters snarl and gnash their teeth, as we see in Christ the Warrior, where the Son of God dons a golden breast plate to lead the hosts of heaven in a battle against Satan, envisioned in his two biblical manifestations as a roaring lion and a dragon. In a 2024 Nativity scene, the manger in Bethlehem has become the planet earth, which Rusetska depicts as the front line in a celestial struggle between good and evil, as the forces of heaven, once again, wage war against a writhing, reptilian Devil, for control of the hapless planet.

Icons are often seen as windows on eternity. Ulyana Tomkevych now paints timeless iconographic prototypes amid ephemeral earthly images of wartime destruction, invoking divine intercession for her embattled homeland. Christ the Ruler of All presides over a smoke-shrouded urban landscape during a Russian missile attack. The Mocked Christ stands in a pool of water formed after the Russians triggered an ecological disaster by their destruction in June 2023 of the Kakhovka Dam, glimpsed in the background. His wounded body amid the flood waters mirrors the violation of Ukrainian lands as the nation endures its own Passion at the hands of foreign invaders.

The  Pope’s traditional Christmas blessing “To the city and the world” echoes through wartime Ukraine in Uliana Krekhovets’ similarly titled Nativity scene. The Virgin Mary extends her cloak to dampen the flames in a besieged city, while the swaddled Baby Jesus lies safe on the far shore of a body of water. The flowing river serves as a symbolic boundary line between war and peace, life and death, the past and the future. In place of the Shepherds and the Wise Man, an overcrowded boat of Ukrainian refugees draws near to the Christ Child. Like his Virgin Mother, their eyes are fixed on the infant, hoping against hope, he will come to dwell with them as the Prince of Peace

In the opening days of the Russian invasion, Krekhovets began making quick sketches, capturing her impressions of daily events in the war. This artistic diary became for her "a powerful tool to keep the emotions in balance, support endurance, and affirm faith in the victory of truth and goodness." Mixed media illustrations now in the collection show children enclosed in a heart against incoming Russian missiles, the victims of the Russian bombing of a Mariupol Theater in March 2022 where they had taken shelter. In the days when the fate of the Kyiv hung the balance, Krekohvets depicted Michael the Archangel, the patron saint of the Ukrainian capital, offering protection to its citizens and defending forces. Her poster for a workshop of Ukrainian artists--some refugees of occupied cities--championed wartime art-making "at the border between past and future."

Known for his minimally modernist icons, Danylo Movchan found this method of art-making to be too “mechanical and emotionless” to capture the complex feelings welling up inside him following the Russian invasion and turned to watercolor, a medium that allows for immediate artistic expression. Movchan still works in a spare, unadorned style rich in signs and symbols but with spontaneous and unpredictable water-laden brushstrucks. He avoids real-life details, elevating the conflict in Ukraine into a cosmic struggle between good and evil, where we view balletic arrangments of amorphous forms in ambigous spaces awash with colors. As Danylo explains: "I’m not interested in realistic depictions of war, but in subtle, symbolic images that express what it really means for us. I want the world to experience through my artworks the horror of what is happening here."

At a time when news reports talk of Russian battlefield “meat wave assaults,” Movchan makes the vulnerable human form, encompassing both soul and body, the central motif of his wartime imagery. His exposed figures are walking spiritual x-rays. Those healthy of mind and body appear red and blue, their vascular systems pumping with life. Those suffering from a sickness of soul are colored unhealthy browns and grays. The corporeal suffering of Christ for humanity serves as an important theme for Movchan, evoking hope against hope in a time of despair. The reoccuring image of the Cross under attack reminds us of just who is on the Lord’s side in this brutal, unprovoked conflict

Hlafira Shcherbak has experienced the war in more personal ways than most artists in the Lviv community. When her fiance was killed in the Russian siege of Mariupol, she channeled her grief into two harrowing images in a solo show at the IconArt Gallery, now in the collection. In You Can’t Catch My Soul, we see a winged being breaking through a confining wire net in an abstract, war-ravaged landscape after battle. Freed from its body, the soul seeking to find Christ bears the image of Christ, affirming that no matter how many Ukrainians the Russian invaders may kill, they will never destroy the spirit of the nation.

The same mystical image of Christ appears again in People in Dark Times alongside ten other faces, engulfed in the blazing inferno of wartime Ukraine. The icon brings to mind the story in the book of Daniel of three Hebrew youths who were cast into a fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to a golden image of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. When the flames did not consume the trio, the King released them, saying he had seen a fourth face in the fiery furnace like “a son of the gods” Shcherbak sees Christ standing with the people of Ukraine through their firery ordeal.

Irina Solonynka found a particularly poignant way to convey the agony of  her homeland in a 2023 painting series titled,“The Saint and the Day.” As Solonynka explains: “Since the onset of the full-scale Russian invasion, our country has endured significant losses. The days of war have merged into one, yet some have left a lasting memory with their particular cruelty, inhumanity, and insane number of casualties. It is these days that I want to recall in these icons, preserving the memory of our dead by invoking the saints the church commemorates on those days, many of them holy martyrs we have forgotten. Each work carries two meanings: in memory of the victims of Russian aggression on a specific day and a tribute to the saint honoured on that date.”

March 19, 2022- Russians bombed the School of Arts in Mariupol, where 400 people were seeking refuge. We remember the 42 Martyrs of Amorium, who refused to deny their faith.

April 2, 2022- The discovery of hundreds of bodies in Bucha and neighbouring areas. We remember the venerable fathers killed by the Saracens in the Monastery of St. Sava.

July 9, 2022- A missile strike on a residential building in Chasiv Yar caused 48 deaths. We remember the venerable David the Tree Dweller of Thessalonica

October 5, 2023- In the village of Hroza, 51 people died, and 5 were wounded. We remember the Prophet Saint Jonah.

Vichnaya Pamyat—Memory Eternal to them all!