Ukrainian artist Margarita Polovinko, whose drawings and pictures excavated her post-Soviet actuality and later, the Russian invasion, died at age 31 whereas serving as a fight medic. Her loss of life was introduced on April 8 by her sister, who wrote in an Instagram publish, “Margarita died defending Ukraine.”
Margarita Polovinko was born on March 24, 1994, in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial metropolis in central Ukraine, and the cultural peripherality of her time and place knowledgeable her early inventive preoccupations.
“My mom labored on the Kryvyi Rih metal plant all her life,” she advised the Ukrainian on-line information outlet Suspilne Kultura in 2023. “While you’re a child and also you see individuals who go to work and don’t look optimistic, no career attracts you. Except it’s one thing that advantages society.” An athlete benched due to a nasty coronary heart, Polovinko as a substitute went to artwork college.
“I’m [interested in] the post-industrial metropolis, post-industrial nature and the place of man on this surroundings,” she mentioned within the interview. “This subject has taken varied varieties, but it surely appears unlikely that I’ll ever end it.” Polovinko favored the areas that even in Kryvyi Rih existed out of sight: mines, quarries, and waste heaps, in addition to the dispensaries addicts frequented. She made empathetic, near-automatic interpretations of those scenes in drawing and oil work. Nobody appeared joyful, precisely, even in vivid colours, however that they had dignity.
Her topics shifted after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. “In artwork, what was attention-grabbing for me was that I began drawing and realized that such primitive themes [like war] require primitive means,” she mentioned. “Drawing is primitive not within the sense of “easy”, however within the sense that it simply goes intuitively. This turned a lifeline for me.” Utilizing a black ballpoint pen, she drew lifeless kids as angels; her pal, Daniil, who was killed within the Ukrainian metropolis of Mariupol, kicking Russians. When the invasion handed one other 12 months, her consideration turned to the banality of evil, and she or he started drawing together with her blood: “I’m not screaming for assist by way of these drawings.”
In a single work, Dream in Touchdown, a skeleton, depicted in skinny black ink, gives a gun to a susceptible determine; the entire web page is smeared with pink.
“It’s simply materials that corresponds to the theme and emotions that the struggle evokes in me,” she mentioned of the blood. “I began studying about varied genocides and wars on the earth, and it made me perceive that one thing was improper with the world, not with us, it made it simpler to simply accept the struggle. However not what it brings: the deaths of individuals, animals, destruction.”
As of February 2025, Ukrainian officers have estimated that greater than 45,000 Ukrainians have been killed and upwards of 400,000 have been wounded because of actions of the Russian army. The invasion has taken a steep toll on Ukraine’s arts and cultural panorama, with an estimated restoration value of $9 billion, in addition to the irreplaceable lack of monuments, museums, and artists. In line with UNESCO, at the least 668 websites, together with 145 non secular websites, 238 constructions of “historic and/or inventive curiosity”, and 32 museums, had been broken.
The Artwork Newspaper and Russian-language press has reported that Artur Snitkus, a Ukrainian artist and musician, died in fight close to Donetsk in June of 2024, and the 18-year-old artist Veronika Kozhushko was killed in a Russian airstrike on Kharkiv that August. Early within the invasion, a trove of work by self-taught folks artist Maria Prymachenko, referred to as “world-famous masterpieces” by the Ukrainian Ministry of International Affairs, burned within the bombing.
