Katia Denysova

In March 1918, the artist Alexandra Exter opened a private art studio in Kyiv. Her teaching methodology combined extremely radical formal experiments with folk art, especially Ukrainian decorative traditions. In the volatile environment of social disruption, Exter’s studio attracted aspiring artists from Kyiv’s Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian communities, who wanted to learn about the latest trends in European art while synthesizing them with elements of their cultural heritage. Exter’s practice problematizes the relationship between the promise of modernist art—especially abstract art—to transcend ethnic or national confines, and its historical debts to vernacular material and folk cultures. By inspecting how Exter and artists affiliated with her studio, especially those from the Jewish Kultur Lige, incorporated indigenous pictorial traditions into their modernist art, the project interrogates the perceived opposition between folk practices and universalist ideals of modernism while examining the complex processes of art production and identity formation in territories ruled by imperial powers.