Olena Turyanska

An artist, author of paper cut art, installations, objects, and artbooks, an interior designer. Lives and works in Lviv.

Olena Turyanska was born in 1966 in Lviv. In 1981-1985, she studied at the Lviv State Arts and Crafts School. After the School, she entered the Lviv State Institute of Arts and Crafts (presently — LNAA), at the Department of Interior Design. According to her, the community in the Institute was changing at the time. Unlike the school, the Academy was a center for artistic creative pursuit and experimentation:

"We kept trying to do something, to experiment. I couldn't say the system was pressing on us that hard in those times, as compared to my Art school years. In the Institute, no ideological issues were competing. That is why we could literally do whatever we wanted." (Vaslavska-Panas, 2018).

First, access to foreign publications gave a chance to borrow and to get inspiration from other art practices, such as from Poles, or Hungarians. Later, we could get the live empirical feeling through study trips, plein airs, residencies. Turyanska was presenting her diploma work under the supervision of Professor, architect Myron Vendzylovych. The artist also mentions Bohdan Soroka, a Lviv-based graphic artist, as her teacher: "He taught me to see, to think, to analyze. And I am extremely grateful for him, beyond imaginable." From the world of art, she was inspired by Peter Bruegel Senior: "When I see his original pieces, I feel ecstatic." (Vaslavska-Panas, 2018). In 1998-2000, she took an internship in the Lodz Academy of Arts, with professor Andrzej Smoczynski. Thereupon, Olena Turyanska was a participant and a curator of the plein air "Crossing Point," first in Lodz, then in Stuttgart, and later in Lviv.

In her paper cut pieces, she resorts to the ever-lasting ideas of the physical and the metaphysical worlds. Symmetry and asymmetry, infinity and harmony, time and space — these are the abstract concepts, among others, backed up with philosophic reflections of the artist, that acquire certain materiality in the author's masterly cut-out works. The duality between the material and the non-material is disappearing. According to Tamara Zlobina, Olena Turyanska managed to exclude the commercial aspect from her creativity (Zlobina, 2010). According to the artist herself, she prioritized in her exhibitions the "selfish motifs" such as world cognition and self-understanding through art (Vaslavska-Panas, 2018). Her works are philosophic and conceptual, meditative, and requiring deep penetration.

She was engaged in the development and implementation of such projects in Lviv as interior design of the Kupol restaurant, the Italian courtyard, and partially contributed to the Amadeus and Veronika restaurants. Besides, she worked with multiple interiors in private apartments. The artist has been member of multiple solo and group exhibitions in Lviv, Kyiv, Poland, Germany, France, and the USA.