BIO

Born in the city of Brovary in 1989, Yevhen Korshunov graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in 2016. He mainly works with painting, drawing and video art to explore myth-making, local history and absurdity. Korshunov has participated in exhibitions and residencies in Ukraine, Poland, France, Great Britain, Norway and Finland.

Projects created during the residency period

Artist’s account: While in Drohobych on an Artists at Risk (AR) residency with Dro.Art, I wanted to paint something related to the city. In fact, there are many different interesting aspects of Drohobych that an artist can “catch on to”. I was personally interested in the architecture of the city — many houses have basements, and almost every old house has them.

While walking around in the center of Drohobych, I saw a child looking at me from a basement window and it seemed to me that these basements might be quite cozy. I wanted to visit one and it became interesting how I’d get there. I ended up going to several of these basements and it turned out that they were not as cozy as I thought.

Stepan Tudor described the life of Lviv’s poor in these semi-basements, which he poetically called basements. And life there was quite unbearable, people were driven there by poverty. Now, part of the inhabitants of Drohobych are driven into these basements not by poverty, but by the danger brought by the war. I created a series of illustrations, fantasies spurred by my imagination about life in these basements. In my work, I was also partly inspired by the work of the artist Bruno Schultz from Drohobych.

This programme is organized by Perpetuum Mobile (PM) as part of the Artists at Risk (AR)-Network in partnership with UNESCO and with the support of Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Teiger Foundation.