ATHENS, GA.- With war raging in Ukraine since 2022, numerous works of art, monuments and historic sites are facing destruction. The Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia is striving to help preserve Ukrainian art and to show its beauty and variety with the exhibition “The Awe of Ordinary Labors: 20th-Century Paintings from Ukraine,” on view January 18 to June 1.

Forty-four Ukrainian paintings from between 1930 and 1980, all from the museum’s collection, capture varieties of socialist realism. This style is characterized by its optimistic pictures of Soviet life and Communist ideologies. Artists were supposed to show the endless battle of the working class against their oppressors. Art was to show not reality but ideals. These demands led to numerous works of Soviet art, including those produced in Ukraine, being purely political propaganda.

Nevertheless, many artists were able to navigate the margins of artistic freedom. “While not condemned or rejected by the official censors, [they] still conveyed highly personal content as well as alternative and at times subversive statements,” said Dr. Asen Kirin, the curator of this exhibition and the museum’s Parker Curator of Russian Art. Kirin, who is also a professor of art history at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, said that visitors can see these alternative and subversive interpretations within paintings in the exhibition, gaining new insights into the visual culture of 20th-century Central and Eastern European art.

Kirin said, “Socialist realism does not constitute an unchanging monolithic block of servile art. Artistic work evolved over time, and remarkable creative individuals left their unique imprints on the visual culture of that era.” He points out that even paintings that seem to celebrate the might of Communist industrialization often include human elements that make the viewer consider the impact of the state on individuals.

Kirin called the exhibition a gesture of solidarity with the Ukrainian people and said, “In our modest way, we are striving to show wider audiences the richness of Ukrainian visual culture.”