The name of Oleksandr Shevchuk was well known in the 90s 一 he exhibited a lot and was published in the cult magazine “NASH”, 一 but today he is little known. Kateryna Yakovlenko talks about the work of the Odessa native who could express any thought through the naked body without vulgarity.
Oleksandr Shevchuk 一 one of the bright but little-known Ukrainian artists of the 1990s who works with photography. Shevchuk was born in 1960 in Odessa. He became interested in photography in childhood: his mother was an amateur photographer. But he learned to shoot and work with equipment on his own. He graduated from the Odessa Engineering and Construction Institute; his narrative and thematic searches were influenced by artists from Kyiv and Odessa 一 Oleksandr Roitburd, Anatoliy Hankevych, Valeriya Trubina.
Oleksandr Shevchuk is often remembered as a documentary photographer who created a massive photo archive of the bohemian life of artists. However, his shots are not so much a document of the rave or everyday life as a reflection on the artistic reality of that time.
For the first time, the public was able to see Shevchuk’s photographs at Oleksandr Solovyov’s exhibitions “Calm” and “Summer” in Kyiv in 1992. Then his photographs were shown alongside works by the AES group, Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, Oleg Holosiy, Arsen Savadov, and Heorhiy Senchenko.
In most of his series, Shevchuk turns to the female and male nude. In his early photographs, the body is usually androgynous, “sculptural”; the artist often makes references to mythology and the Ancient world.
For example, in the series “The Artist’s Tomb,” the author plays with the artistic environment, presenting Odessa authors 一 Anatoliy Hankevych, Oleksandr Roitburd, Leonid Voitsekhiv, Oleg Mighas, Dmytro Ligerois, Dmytro Dulfan as pharaohs and gods. Each hero of his photographic series is depicted surrounded by naked boys. Such emphasis on the artists, a certain queerness and carnivalesque convey the irony inherent in Ukrainian Odessa art at the turn of the decades.
Another example of playing with art history was the untitled series (sometimes signed as “Homo 一 Asterius Games”), in which naked human bodies are presented like ancient sculptures. The photographs painted red create a surreal perception and convey a certain mysticism. The author embodied a similar plot and idea in another series 一 “Garden and Park Sculpture.”
In Shevchuk’s early series, the naked body is shown rather as asexual, although sometimes elements of eroticism and even queer eroticism are present. The artist was more interested in texture, composition, geometry, and experiment. For example, his series “Heat-2” (“Zhara-2”) with naked models on the Odessa coast may seem hot, but the attitude towards the body in these shots, despite sometimes too frank poses, is not vulgarized. In some photographs, the body even merges with the hot sea shore, mimicking the sandy relief.
The search for composition led the author to create the series “Tic-Tac-Toe,” where the artist literally recreates the board game using naked human bodies.
However, from the mid-1990s, his “bodies” acquire traits of sexuality, and often even hypersexuality. The author increasingly turns to political and social themes, which he also reveals through nudity, but in a different, more radical way. His approach to shooting also changes: Shevchuk increasingly works with digital photography and less with analog printing methods; color increasingly “seeps” into his photography.
The author increasingly turns to political and social themes, which he reveals through nudity.
In the 2000s, Oleksandr Shevchuk’s works often appeared in the cult magazine “NASH” alongside photographs by artists of the Kharkiv School of Photography and Mykola Troha. Curatorial practice was also important for Shevchuk. He was one of the authors of the exhibition “NASHI,” dedicated to the artists of the “Paris Commune,” and a number of other projects.
With his photographic legacy, Shevchuk slips out of the conceptual textual and pictorial Odessa context and, despite close ties with the scene, is an autonomous author.
