Three Abstract Compositions

Hryhorii Havrylenko made these three abstract compositions in ink, sometime before 1984. I love how each form is caged within its own little world. It's almost like he's figuring out different ways of seeing, trapping each idea within a box, but still allowing them to breathe through his loose mark-making. The consistent hatching in the background makes the forms pop. Look at the middle composition: the shape is almost like a deconstructed, flattened animal, maybe a dog or a lizard? There's a beautiful tension between the bold outlines and the frantic scribble of the background, pushing and pulling our eye. These feel like the kinds of drawings that could have been made by Paul Klee, both artists play with abstraction and the relationship between form and space, inviting us to get lost in the process of seeing.