Vlodko (Volodymyr) Kostyrko

An artist, art critic, curator, art collector, and interior designer. Author of paintings, graphic art, collages, assemblages, installations, environments, and street art. Lives and works in Lviv.

He was born in 1967 in Lviv. In 1982-1987, Kostyrko studied at the Ivan Trush School of Arts and Crafts; in 1990-1995, he was a student at the Faculty of the History of Arts at Lublin Catholic University. He founded and self-published the Kremniuk magazine, whose literary core consisted of the Lviv LuHoSad group members.

In many cases, lifting the iron curtain gave an impetus for experimentation with new materials and forms. For some artists, experiments forced onto the back burner the conventional "boring" figurative painting. However, Lviv painters Volodymyr Kostyrko and Yevhen Ravskyi took the classic painting language of the Western tradition as a basis for creating new contemporary themes, while often resorting to irony.

"In Soviet times, the irony helped not to fall into hysteria or despair because of the pressure from the system. It was a wonderful way to keep away from all the black-and-white divisions, such as "right-wrong," "good-bad", "art-non-art" …"(Natalia Kosmolinska, "Louvre" — Game challenge, Zbruč, 2013).

 Kostyrko exploits the medieval painting stylistics, the Renaissance, or baroque, to talk about the present days densely permeated with the images of Western European art (Filonenko, "The Truth of the Art Is Fiction", 2017). On this account, the artist would often be called a "myth-maker" and a "mystifier of Galicia". His early works are the visualization of the history of the crown land of Galicia and Lodomeria. In 1998-1999, Kostyrko produced a cycle of portraits of the leading cultural figures, as part of an international art project "Grands of Arts." He was also a chief art designer at the Halytskyi Lytsar ("Galician Knight") events. According to Bohdan Voron, "the artist was disillusioned about the Great Ukraine, that is why the lead character of his works is the Grand Galicia" (Voron, 2013).

In his creative work, he is trying to use the painterly techniques of the past but opens their imagery to doubt. Thus, at the exhibition The Truth of Art Is Fiction (2017) in Kharkiv, he de-mythologized the role of an artist; at the Kyiv-based Art…&Of (2015), he re-interpreted an image of a woman by expanding the range of her "usual" roles.

In addition to the purely artistic activities, Kostyrko does interior designs, such as for the coffee shops and restaurants in Lviv. Some of them are: Pid Syniov Fliashkov ("Under the Blue Bottle"), Café 1, Kabinet ("The Cabinet"), Kumpel ("The Buddy"), Khmilnyi Dim Roberta Domsa ("The Liquor Place of Robert Doms"), CK Lokal, Mons Pius, Kentavr, Atlas. In his designs, Kostyrko produced the images from the past, mostly Habsburg-times Lviv, and made the paintings for the places. With his designs, Kostyrko launched a peculiar "Lviv style," often replicated by other designers and going far beyond Lviv. In addition, Kostyrko is active in street art, with preferences on paperwork rather than on classic graffiti.