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Everything I am not
Karen van den Berg
Swiftly drawn, irregular, thick, black brushstrokes fan out around an area of muddy black and red paint. Where the brush, freshly dipped in deep black hits it, drops of colour run down the canvas. The background is formed of a light grey, which has been applied to the canvas in a loose movement of horizontal strokes. Other layers of colour shine through underneath. A signal red glows at the bottom left. At the upper edge of the picture, light grey-blue and overpainted black lines lie beneath the dirty, streaked light grey. This is a rough description of the 90 x 80 cm painting Dreamer (2024), if the head of a person with a mohawk hairstyle were not also recognisable here.
The paintings of the artist Ryta Miskevych, who was born in 1989 in Yevpatoriya, Crimea, and who came to Germany to study in 2011, always invite us to see in a double sense. On the one hand, they engage the eye through the gestural use of colour and, on the other, they are images of a reality that are only vaguely recognisable but nevertheless appear familiar.
In the solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Kleinschönach on Lake Constance, a 160 x 220 cm work from 2024 was hanging by the entrance, and I recognised immediately the historical image on which it was based. Miskevych uses the same title as the painting from around 1880 from which it was inspired: The Zaporozhian Cossacks write a letter to the Turkish Sultan. Miskevych’s painting of quick strokes interprets one of the most famous pictures of the history of the Cossacks, painted by Ilya Repin, who was born in Chuhuiv near Kharkiv in 1844 and is regarded as the most important representative of “Russian” realism at the end of the 19th century. The painting, which served as Miskevych’s model, created an iconic monument to the unbridled virility of the Cossacks. [1]
The people in Repin’s painting are hyper-realistic portraits of contemporary political and cultural figures who slip into the role of their ancestors and re-enact an event said to have taken place in 1676. The historical scene shows the Cossacks dictating to a scribe a letter to Sultan Mehmed IV. According to legend, they wrote an abusive letter with coarse insults that could hardly be surpassed and whose crude vocabulary is comparable in intensity to the battles of today’s gangster rappers. In the letter, the Cossacks wished the Turkish sultan to hell instead of submitting to his demands.[2] The fun the men supposedly had dictating is written all over their faces and bodies in Repin’s painting.
In contrast, Miskevych’s painting captures only the tumultuousness of the scene – like a sketch of a distant memory. Repin’s bright red colour has been replaced by muted tones. Those unfamiliar with the legend and the historical painting can only see in Miskevych’s work that someone is sitting and writing in the midst of wildly gesticulating men. As in the original, another figure in the background is pointing to the left into nowhere. The faces, however, are blank – as in many of the Ukrainian artist’s works.
The painting is the only historical reference in the Kleinschönach exhibition and is also the only work that makes reference to the artist’s Ukranian origins. The work seems like a distant, indistinct, yet intense memory in which the bodies of the figures appear to be intertwined. All the other paintings utilise pop-cultural motifs and media images. However, the missing, blank or overpainted faces are a frequently recurring feature for example in the work Im Liegen [Engl. Lying Down](2022, oil on canvas 45 x 35 cm).
The Dreamer with the mohawk hairstyle also has neither eyes nor ears. His head is slightly lowered and his profile shows a closed mouth. The lack of body openings lends the figure a hermetic air. Only a few splashes of red colour, which seem to jump out of the face, counteract the closed-in impression. Otherwise, the Dreamer seems to be alone with himself – inaccessible to our gaze. The brushstrokes also conceal more than they reveal. Something behind it, which repeats elements of the figure in the foreground, shimmers through, but it remains just a hint of something that we cannot recognise. The picture does not invite empathy with its subject. We look at him from the outside, as if at someone who is also there, who shares this world with us, someone we are not, someone we do not know, but who we could be. “[A]ll humanity is based upon a capacity of consciousness that is not at all self-evident-not having to think of oneself as the person one is, but rather thinking of every other person as the person one could be,” wrote the philosopher Hans Blumenberg.[3] It is such associations that Miskevych’s pictures of faceless people evoke.
It may come as a surprise to some that the exhibition brings together very different motifs, but also includes completely abstract paintings. In addition to erotic scenes, faceless portraits, posing models from fashion magazines, animals whose eyes glow eerily out of the darkness as if captured with an infrared camera or manga-like figures, there are also non-objective, muted patterns and abstract colour paintings.
It is immediately clear that the artist, who studied painting in Kharkiv, Mainz and Karlsruhe, is concerned with painting itself, with painting as an act of approaching the world; or, as the artist herself says in conversation, with the attempt to “be awake to the world” and to struggle for freedom of action in it.
What Miskevych presents in the exhibition is not a hard-won selection of subjects that aspire to significance; rather, her painting style also negates any individual expression or individual handwriting that would reveal conventional signs of artistic authorship or subjectivity. At no point does the painter herself and her individual experiences come to the fore. It is the activity of painting itself that seems important: as an activity, in all its randomness and all its provisionality.
In her famous work The Human Condition, published in 1958, the philosopher Hannah Arendt distinguished between the concepts of labour, work and action. In the case of working, it is the end-product that counts, whereas no one can act alone; it is a political activity, always dependent on others on whom the action has an effect or with whom it is carried out together. Labour, on the other hand, is an activity that never ends. It has no beginning and no end. The washing up has to be done again and again. Labour is directed towards survival. [4]
If Miskevych’s works were to be categorised in this system, they would be about labouring in the Arendtian sense, about paying attention to life as such, with all its contingencies and all moments of simple activity. Miskevych’s works therefore do not focus on the present as something crisis-like, nor do they show anything heroic. They collect what is happening and what we can encounter everywhere: on the street, in the mass media, on the Internet, in museums, on billboards, in nature. The artist is not interested in exclusive experiences, but in accessible ubiquitous motifs that are both familiar and strange at the same time. She explores their depth of experience through her painting.
The 210 x 210 cm painting entitled Sportsman from 2023, for example, shows only thinly dripping yellow, white and grey as well as flesh-coloured splashes of paint – spread across a square canvas. At the top left corner, the flowing, translucent clouds and splashes of colour are held by a dark red border, which contrasts with the light yellow and ochre in a shimmering pink arc.
Why this painting is called Sportsman remains a mystery; personal memories, according to the artist. Yellow tones and white were applied with a broad brush. The thin, fluid paint runs across the canvas, mixing with white and grey traces of paint that seem to have been thrown onto the canvas, with two flesh-coloured spots slightly offset to the right of the centre. In some places the colour glows like an aura, in others it shimmers softly. These are colour formations of decay and wounding as well as impressions that announce a world in statu nascendi, a world that comes after us or was before us.
Miskevych’s paintings interweave realities. Is the structure on the left in the painting Hippopotamus (2023, oil on canvas, 210 x 210) a chair? Does the blue line on the right suggest a tabletop? Are the red outlines at the top left of the painting oversized hippopotamus-shaped biscuit forms or something else entirely?
How familiar can we be with a world that contains such fundamentally different things, non-things, half-things, signs, codes, atmospheres, colours and feelings, that unites manga characters and erotic scenes in which bodies blur at the bottom? Miskevych’s works are collections of the ambiguous, like streams of consciousness that seem important to us but cannot be captured. The artist creates a pictorial world that is both strangely elusive and yet present, a world that manages without drama and horror. It is crucial that she does not push a sovereign painterly self into the foreground. The things, formations and half-things (like the chair, which is perhaps not a chair) become significant precisely because they have no tangible meaning, but simply appear, come and go.
In the light of Miskevych’s images, we can ask what it means to paint in this way in the so-called post-internet age, in an age of the hyper-presence of media images. What does it mean to want to be a painter in an era in which the articulation and situatedness of one’s own identity as well as speaking in the first-person singular in science and art, as the US political scientist Bernard Harcourt wrote in 2020, have become the new guiding formula?[5] Miskevych clearly rejects such widespread “first-person expressions”, as Harcourt calls it. Rather, her paintings raise the perennial question of the peculiarity of painting as a medium.
Painting is unquestionably a medium with which people have always worked their way through the world, with which we create the world once again, duplicate it in order to distance ourselves from it. Painting, it seems from Miskevych’s works, is both an approach to the world and a distancing from it. It gives us nothing to learn. Rather, it is a mode that allows us to be active without having to be sovereign, to carry out an activity that relieves us of having to give meaning to everything and yet at the same time protects us from indifference. Painting, as Miskevych’s works show, can also help us not to consider ourselves too important and, above all, to marvel at everything that stands before our eyes and that is not ourselves.
[1] There are several versions of this painting. The model used by Miskevych is a preliminary sketch of the masterpiece now in St Petersburg. This preliminary sketch used by Miskevych is now kept in the Tretyakov Gallery. Cf. https://www.artrenewal.org/artwork/index/55122; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossacks_(sketch,_1893,_Kharkiv).jpg and https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossacks_%28sketch%2C_1880-90%2C_GTG%29.JPG.
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[2] Thomas M. Prymak: Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021. 173-199.
[3] Hans Blumenberg: Care Crosses the River Stanford California: Stanford University Press 2010, p. 47 (italics in original).
[4] Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1958, p. 79ff.
[5] Bernard Harcourt: Critique and Praxis, New York: Columbia University Press 2020, p.17.