Zenovii Ketsalo

Zenovii Ketsalo was a distinguished Ukrainian painter and graphic artist who left behind a considerable body of work comprising over 1,000 pieces.

The artist was proficient in all classical techniques of easel graphics. Zenovii Ketsalo’s paintings and graphic works were exhibited in Ukraine and abroad, at prestigious exhibitions and international vernissages.

The artist was born in 1919 in the village of Dobrivliany into the family of a railway worker. From 1933 to 1938 he studied at the Lviv School of Arts and Crafts, where he acquired the arts of drawing and composition, sculpture, and graphic craft, as well as oil and fresco painting.

Subsequently, in 1938–1939, he studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts under the instruction of Kazimierz Dunikowski, Jan Henryk Rosen, Kazimierz Sichulski, and Ludwik Tyrowicz.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, he taught technical drawing and art at a secondary school in Khodoriv, before relocating to Lviv. In 1941, he was conscripted into the army.

Charged with "anti-Soviet propaganda," he was transferred to a penal battalion, arrested on 9 February 1944, and sentenced on 28 May 1944 to eight years in labour camps in the Urals, followed by three years' deprivation of civil rights.

He was not released until 1953, after which he returned to Lviv. From 1957 onwards he participated in regional, all-Ukrainian, and international art exhibitions. Solo exhibitions were held in Lviv in 1979, 1989, 1993, and 2009.

In 1962 he joined the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR. The following year he was elected head of the graphics section and member of the board of the Lviv Regional Organisation of the Union of Artists of the Ukrainian SSR. From 1990 he held the title of Honoured Artist of Ukraine; in 1995 he was awarded the title of People's Artist of Ukraine.

During the 1950s his canvases were frequently exhibited at Lviv exhibitions. The artwork of  Zenovii Ketsalo subsequently appeared at prestigious exhibitions and international vernissages beyond Ukraine, with the artist presenting his work in New York, Toronto, Chicago, Rzeszów, and Przemyśl.

Zenovii Ketsalo passed away in 2010.

The artist worked across the fields of easel painting, graphics, and decorative and applied arts.

Among Zenovii Ketsalo’s original paintings are Moonlit Night (1976), Village Still Life (1979), Tundra (1983), Taras's Mountains in Sedniv (1987), St George's Church in Drohobych (1990), A Sunny Day in the Carpathians (1998), Chornobyl Madonna (2001), Flowers of Hoverla (2003), and many others.

Among his graphic works, particular distinction belongs to the linocuts News (1964), Young Women from Kryvorivnia (1966), and The Caucasus from an Aeroplane (1970), as well as the lithograph Cossack Graves (1989), among others.

UFDA digitized Summer in Vorokhta (1997) by the artist from the collection of the Regional Communal Museum of Local History in Borshchiv. This painting is now available for viewing on the fund's website.

Ketsalo was the author of portraits, landscapes of Polissia, the Subcarpathian region, and Crimea, still lifes, and thematic compositions. His principal printmaking techniques included woodcut, linocut, etching, aquatint, mezzotint, lithography, and the estampe. He created illustrations for the works of Lesia Ukrainka and Ukrainian folk tales, produced 180 sketches of traditional Ukrainian national dress, and executed monumental works in mosaic, sgraffito, and majolica in churches and public buildings across the towns and villages of Ukraine.

His artistic practice is characterised by dynamism, vitality, and topicality, as well as a capacity to invest everyday motifs with philosophical depth.