Oleg Holosiy

Oleg Mykolayovych Holosiy (31 May 1965 – 18 January 1993) was a Ukrainian painter and one of the key representatives of the New Wave of Ukrainian art that formed in the last Soviet years and the first years of independence. He became associated with the Kyiv “Paris Commune” squat. He is regarded as a significant figure in the history of Ukrainian contemporary art.

Biography Holosiy was born in 1965 in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro). He studied at the Yevhen Vuchetych Dnipro Art School in the workshop of Leonid Antonyuk, graduating in 1984. He later continued his education at the Kyiv State Art Institute, in the Department of Monumental Painting, graduating in 1990. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he took part in a number of important exhibitions of the time, including Silence (Shtyl) in Kyiv in 1992 and Postanesthesia in Munich in 1992. By the early 1990s he had become a notable figure of the Ukrainian New Wave and exerted a substantial influence on other artists in Ukraine and abroad.

Holosiy’s work is often described as expressive, drawing on literature, cinema, religion and reflections on life and death. During his life he collaborated with the Moscow gallery “Regina” and exhibited both in Ukraine and internationally.

His works are held in private collections and institutions in Ukraine and abroad, and he is frequently cited as a key figure of the Ukrainian New Wave and the Parcommune (Paris Commune) circle.