Casually 1989

Curator: Wow, the immediacy just grabs you, doesn’t it? There’s a kind of raw honesty that really sings to my soul. Editor: And the sheer scale of it amplifies that feeling. We're looking at Oleg Holosiy’s "Casually," created in 1989 using both oil and acrylic paints on canvas. Holosiy was a significant figure in the Ukrainian New Wave movement. Curator: New Wave alright, I feel like I’ve been splashed with a bucket of… something, some deep, unnamable feeling. It’s like he's not just painting figures, but states of being. That lone figure clinging to the...the rightmost one...is captivating. A sense of desperate reaching. Editor: Holosiy, alongside others, were reacting against the imposed socialist realism, critiquing Soviet society and exploring themes of alienation and identity with a bold visual language. I’m seeing an embrace of expressionism, an urge to break from the molds imposed by the Soviet aesthetic regime. Curator: Alienation definitely hits the mark. They’re ghostly and present simultaneously—they occupy this weird liminal space. I keep circling back to that smaller, darker figure—a tiny counterweight to the ethereality. I can sense so much more in the painting, a full, complex human story without clearly recognizable details. Editor: This "casual" depiction—which ironically is anything but—mirrors that societal shift, an unofficial voice, capturing emotions that had previously been muted and forbidden. Curator: Right? Nothing casual about any of this. It's more like confronting. It stays with you, worms its way in...makes you reconsider "casual" encounters. Editor: It asks questions about how art operates as a political project of imaging or de-imaging social subjects, power relations and historical contexts, or to question institutional structures that underpin how we engage with contemporary Ukrainian art today. Thank you for helping bring into sharper focus an overlooked corner of the museum's history. Curator: No, thank you. It’s these kinds of emotionally-charged pieces that breathe fresh life into art history, stirring emotions into academia to offer fresh perspective. It really does help remind me to check my casual side at the door!