Underground

The underground was the unofficial, nonconformist art that existed in the USSR and Ukraine outside the state system from roughly the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Its key idea was creative freedom and aesthetic autonomy under conditions in which the only permitted style was Socialist Realism and any formal or spiritual experiment was deemed ideologically hostile. Underground artists worked "for the drawer," without access to official exhibitions, and presented their work at apartment exhibitions, in studios and within a narrow circle of the initiated. Their language was extremely diverse — abstraction, Surrealism, metaphysical painting, religious and philosophical imagery — united only by a rejection of the official aesthetic. In Ukraine an especially vivid centre was the Lviv underground school of Karlo Zvirynsky, who privately taught young people modern art and spiritual culture. In Kyiv worked Valeriy Lamakh, author of the philosophical "Books of Schemes," Hryhoriy Havrylenko with his refined lyricism, and the eccentric Fedir Tetyanych (Frypulya) with his utopian "Biotechnosphere." The underground was not a single organisation but rather a network of individual figures and circles bound together by inner emigration and a refusal of conformism. Unlike Soviet nonconformism, with its louder actions such as the "Bulldozer Exhibition" of 1974, the Ukrainian underground was even more isolated and almost entirely deprived of publicity. For years its works were seen by no one beyond the closest circle of like-minded friends. This era preserved the continuity of the modern search through the age of stagnation and nurtured the milieu from which the Ukrainian New Wave erupted in the late 1980s. The underground became a bridge between the repressed avant-garde of the early century and the free contemporary art of independent Ukraine.