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international infos about what's going on in the capital of Ukraine: good tips that will make your stay much easier and profitable.

Kiev Pinchuk Art Center

Welcome to kievculture, the ultimate web page for visitors, students, tourists, expatriates, locals who want to have the best urban and   international infos about what's going on in the capital of Ukraine: good tips that will make your stay much easier and profitable. 

Kiev PinchukArtCentre:  
 
If you like contemporary art, or also just want to enjoy one of the best design terrace view restaurant on the city, YOU HAVE TO VISIT the PinchukArtCentre.

Open since 2006, this centre has 6 floors, 5 dedicated to contemporary art (Russian, Ukrainian, international, depending on the temporary exhibitions)...

Expos are in general for two months, and even more in summer.

At the moment, the temporary expo is: “Sexuality and transcendence”. 24 April 2010 - 19 September 2010.

AES+F, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Illya Chichkan, Elmgreen & Dragset, Jan Fabre, Jenny Holzer,Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Annette Messager, Boris Michailov, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Tino Sehgal, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Open all days except Mondays, from 12H TO 21H, free entrance (but sometimes 20 minutes waiting to enter)

Exhibition viewing tours in the PinchukArtCentre: each day there are 3 guided tours organised for the art centre visitors. The exhibition viewing groups are formed at 14.00, 17.00 and 19.00 near the reception counter on the first floor.

If you are interested in guided tour in English for more than 5 people, contact us at kievculture@gmail.com

About the expo:

The PinchukArtCentre is pleased to announce a major international group exhibition with 19 leading artists of our time, devoted to Sexuality and Transcendence as a central theme of contemporary art. On view from April 24, 2010 through September 16, 2010 the exhibition examines the diversity and complexity of the art produced on this theme today.

The show displays the sparkling dialogue of various artistic approaches in the tension field between the two extremes of raw sexuality and a sublime transformation into transcendence.

Featuring loans from both artists’ studios and private collections the exhibition includes nineteen major work groups with a total of 150 individual works in twenty rooms on four floors of the PinchukArtCentre. Many works have never been shown publicly before.

The staircases of the building are used as art spaces for the first time with installations by Jenny Holzer. In addition, for the first time ever, the PinchukArtCentre utilised the historical Bessarabskiy market hall located opposite for an eighty-meter-long frieze by AES+F.

Jeff Koons’ Balloon Rabbit a monumental sculpture from his famous celebration series will has his world premier at the PinchukArtCentre together with other key works created over twenty years.

‘Sexuality combines the idea of a world of subjective emotional references, a world of the instant, of anticipation, of desire and becoming and of orientation and disintegration as well as the extremes of destruction and violence. Sexuality is associated with an image of the real, of warmth and intimacy, whereas transcendence implies a world beyond reality. The concepts of spirituality and transformation predominate the latter, a sophisticated consciousness far from any purely subjective object-relatedness’ – Eckhard Schneider, the General Director of the PinchukArtCentre and the curator of the show.

The issue of sexuality and transcendence touches on a fundamental conflict in art in general because, beyond mere appearance, behind it hides the general question of the relationship between reality (life) and imagination (image). And so the relationship between form and vision becomes a crucial issue for any artist dealing with sexuality and transcendence. Which direction is a particular work going for? Does it answer the challenge with a praise of distance (form/transcendence) or with a demonstration of intimacy (life/sexuality)? The answers to these questions are so varied because, in addition to the paradigms inherent in the theme, the concept of desire is of central importance here. The general idea is kept open, both in respect of a desire for an ideal mental clarity, intellectual penetration and clarified form, and in respect of a desire for an ideal of realism, emotional directness and dissolution of form.

Of the 18 chosen, 14 have never been exhibited in Ukraine before. Among them are Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Jan Fabre, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Boris Mikhailov and the collective AES+F. “It is really 18 solo exhibitions,” says Eckhard Schneider, the curator of the exhibition. “Everyone has their own space.”

Jeff Koons takes a key role in the exhibition with a comprehensive presentation of works from the last twenty years. Spread over three different floors of the PinchukArtCentre building, they form the backbone of the exhibition. A total of ten key works, six sculptures and four paintings from the series Made in Heaven, Celebration, Popeye, Hulk Elvis are on display. Highlights of this selection are the early icon Rabbit, the sculptures Cracked Egg and Blue Diamond from the Celebration series and the world premiere of the first version of Balloon Rabbit, an astonishing new creation, surely becoming an icon like his key early work. Koons’ contribution thus acts like a mini-retrospective on the theme that forms the core of his whole oeuvre, namely, the ambivalent relationship between sexuality and transcendence.

New co-operations with international cultural institutions and numerous embassies have enabled an extensive programme of panel discussions concerning art, literature and film, in the context of the globally important question of the relationship between morals and state censorship. 

After the expo, you can go to the restaurant on the 6 floor, to enjoy a good vegetarian meal with a perfect view on the city and nice lounge deep house music. The cart is full of delicious dishes, including vegetarian sushi, sandwiches served with different sauces, or nice salads, that you can accompany with different kinds of tea (the ginger tea is good for health and super energetic), or other selections of soft or alcoholic drinks.

A perfect moment to be there in between the day and the night, so you can see the colourful sunset in the city and enjoy the welcoming of the night with little candles at the table. Very romantic ambiance and style, perfect service, great food and drinks, ideal music: the best place to relax after the expo or to chill out in a charming and romantic company ;)

Adress: PinchukArtCentre 
1/3-2, "А" Block, 
Chervonoarmyska / Baseyna str., 
Kyiv , Ukraine 01004 
tel.: +38 (044) 590/08/58

more infos: http://pinchukartcentre.org/ 
 
 

Previously at the Pinchuk Art Center last year in 2009:

At the moment, the temporary expo is : “Requiem”. Damien Hirst : 25 April 2009 - 20 September 2009: open all days except mondays , from 12H TO 21H, free entrance (but sometime 20 minutes waiting to enter)

Exhibition viewing tours in the PinchukArtCentre: each day there are 3 guided tours organised for the art centre visitors. The exhibition viewing groups are formed at 14.00, 17.00 and 19.00 near the reception counter on the first floor.

If you are interested in guided tour in english for more than 5 people, contact us at kievculture@gmail.com

"Art’s about invention, and we are all desperately trying to invent a better future, and to learn from our past. I see a healthy, hungry audience for art and all types of culture in the Ukraine, and that inspires me." Damien Hirst

"Requiem is not just the end but the beginning. Not just the epitome of life but hope for the future. After night comes a new dawn. A new page follows the one before. I believe that Damien Hirst continues to push and challenge boundaries with his creativity. Requiem opens a new chapter for him. We see a different Hirst  our midst". Victor Pinchuk

"The PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) is pleased to announce Requiem, a major retrospective of over 100 works dating from 1990 to 2008, by Damien Hirst. Requiem opens on 25th April and continues through 20th September 2009. Since the start of his career, Hirst has pushed the boundaries of art and what it means to be an artist. Requiem bears witness to a bold new direction in his work by showing for the first time a series of skull paintings he created between 2006 and 2008. In works such as Floating Skull, 2006, The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, 2008 and Men Shall Know Nothing, 2008, Hirst returns to the solitary practice of painting and confronts, in very personal terms, the darkness that lies at the heart of human nature and experience."

"Requiem brings together many of the artist's most celebrated works. Ranging from early iconic sculptures such as A Thousand Years, 1990 and Away from the Flock, 1994 to more recent works like the monumental butterfly triptych, Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven, 2007 as well as Death Explained, 2007, a sculpture of a shark cut in half in formaldehyde, the exhibition shows the extraordinary breadth of Hirst's artistic enterprise."

About damine hirst: "Damien Hirst’s wide-ranging practice – installations, sculpture, painting and drawing – has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture. His energy and inventiveness, and his consistently visceral, visually arresting work, has made him a leading artist of his generation.

Hirst explores the uncertainty at the core of human experience; love, life, death, loyalty and betrayal through unexpected and unconventional media. Best known for the ‘Natural History’ works, which present animals in vitrines suspended in formaldehyde such as the iconic The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) and Mother and Child Divided (1993), his works recast fundamental questions concerning the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence. For Hirst, the vitrine functions as both window and barrier, seducing the viewer into the work visually while providing a minimalist geometry to frame, contain and objectify his subject. In many of the sculptures of the 1990s, such as The Acquired Inability to Escape (1991) and The Asthmatic Escaped (1992) a human presence was implied through the inclusion of relic-like objects: clothes, cigarettes, ashtrays, tables and chairs. That implied human presence became explicit in Ways of Seeing (2000), a vitrine sculpture with a figure of a laboratory technician seated at a desk looking through a microscope. The more celebratory work Hymn (2000), a polychrome bronze sculpture, reveals the anatomical musculature and internal organs of the human body on a monumental scale. Hirst is equally renowned for his paintings. These include his ‘Butterfly Paintings’, tableaux of actual butterflies suspended in paint, or in Amazing Revelations (2003), for instance, he arranged thousands of butterfly wings in a mandala-like pattern. His ‘Spin’ series are made with a machine that centrifugally disperses the paint steadily poured onto a shaped canvas surface, while his ‘Spot’ series have a rigorous grid of uniform sized dots. Recently, he has explored photo-realism in the ‘Fact’ paintings.

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, UK. He lives and works in London and Devon. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Into Me / Out of Me, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006), In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Tate Britain, the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and Century City, Tate Modern (2001). Solo exhibitions include Astrup Fearnley Museet fur Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2005), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2005) and Archaeological Museum, Naples (2004). He received the DAAD fellowship in Berlin in 1994 and the Turner Prize in 1995"

After the expo, you can go to the restaurant on the 6 floor, to enjoy a good vegetarian meal with a perfect view on the city and a ncie lounge deep house music. The cart is fulll of delicious dishes, including begetairn sushi, sandwiches served wiht diferent sauces, or nice salads, that you can accompagne wiht diferent kinds of tea (the ginger tea is good for health and super energetic), or other selections of soft or alcolic drinks.

A perfect moment to be there in between the day and the night, so you can see the colourfull sunset in the city and enjoy the welcoming of the night wiht little candles in the table. Very romantic ambiance and style, perfect service , great food and drinks, ideal music, : the best place to relax after the expo or to chill out in a charming and romantic company;)

more infos: http://pinchukartcentre.org/

For more information about parties, culture + nightlife, trips, hostels +apatments, or advices about how to meet people, language exchange, or to travel to Madrid or from Madrid, DO NOT HESITATE to call me
+ 380 962399723 (my name is Rubén) or if i do not answer, to send me an email at kievculture@gmail.com (kievculture@gmail.com)