Valeri Gourski

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Valeri Gourski 1998 on the occasion of an exhibition opening.
Self-portrait Valeri Gourski

Valeri Gourski ( Ukrainian Валерій Гурський Valerij Hurskyj , born July 9, 1954 in Kovel , Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ; † December 13, 2006 in Klwatka Królewska , Poland ) was a Ukrainian painter and sculptor. He left the USSR in September 1990 and has lived in Germany ever since . He was shaped by a Christian upbringing at home and the Ukrainian Pentecostal movement , by the national-Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and by the artist and art politician Nicholas Roerich . He had a theosophical conception of art, preferred an expressionistic style of painting and an allegorical - figurative sculptural style .

Live and act

Valeri Gourski came from an evangelical priestly family in Ukraine and grew up in the - for the individual and art - highly repressive climate of the former Soviet Union. In 1972 he completed an apprenticeship as a wood sculptor and was then assigned to the construction of the Kursk nuclear power plant near the Russian-Ukrainian border because of religious refusal to do military service .

After his time in power plant construction in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, Gourski worked as a wood sculptor, as an art carver, as a teacher at the vocational school in Kovel, and created sculptures and paintings. He founded the expressionist artist group “WER”, exhibited paintings in Kiev and Moscow and took part in conferences of avant-garde nonconformist artists in Moscow.

He came from a devout Pentecostal family who had suffered greatly under Stalin because of their practiced faith in an atheistic state. Valeri Gourski was also a prayer leader and completed his long preaching career in 1985 with the ordination as a priest of the Orthodox Christian Catacomb Church . The Pentecostal church was too narrow-minded for him. He also became an active member of the national-Ukrainian movement Taras Shevchenko, which campaigned for the preservation and approval of the Ukrainian language.

With these attitudes he set himself in stark contrast to the ideologies and doctrines prescribed by the state such as atheism , socialist realism in art and the ideal of the Soviet unified state with a unified Russian language. He was also in opposition to the systematic Russian Orthodox Church . His strong desire for artistic freedom and his understanding of art as a medium independent of state influence earned him the accusation of subversiveness and led to his discrimination by the state power. As a result, he saw no more life and art development prospects for himself in the USSR and left his home country in 1990. Gourski came to Munich in November 1990 on adventurous routes through still communist Eastern Europe . There he was on 24 November 1990 - while painting at the Munich - three weeks after his arrival Karlsplatz arrested by the police and three weeks in detention taken. He responded with a hunger strike while in custody and applied for asylum . He later recorded the arrest himself in his painting The Stamp (see works). The picture shows how an artist is arrested and "stamped" by the police while painting.

The Federal Commissioner for Asylum Matters successfully appealed against Gourski's recognition as a foreign refugee . Gourski's application for asylum was rejected by the Bavarian administrative courts after four and a half years, and in the spring of 1995 he was threatened with deportation to Ukraine, which was now independent from the Soviet Union .

During his ongoing asylum procedure, Gourski participated in around 50 exhibitions and art events in southern Germany between 1990 and 1995. In April / May 1995 he moved from Munich to Dietzenbach in Hesse . There he carved allegorical figures from the Russian fairy tale world and from the flora and fauna of the forest area into an approximately 8 meter high dug oak trunk. He called it "forest spirit tribe". The city of Dietzenbach bought the wooden sculpture and had it installed in front of the town hall in 1995.

Valeri Gourski also created an approximately three meter high filigree wooden sculpture entitled "Äskulap-Stamm" in Dietzenbach, which was set up in front of a radiological doctor's practice in the city center. Another large-format wooden sculpture stands in the inner courtyard of the Frankenberg (Eder) district court (“Justitia und Minerva”), which became state property following financial subsidies from the Hessian Ministry of Education and Justice and following private donations from the judiciary. There are also large sculptures in the Neu-Isenburg forest swimming pool and in the old town hall of Barsinghausen ("Little Hessentagsbär").

In autumn 1995 Valeri Gourski wrote an autobiographical poem in which he expressed his connection to Dietzenbach:

“My friend, believe me.
I saw a miracle.
And in Dietzenbach, back then,
in autumn, very deep.
I went to paint.
Hot leaves, cold evening,
and an ancient house.
I'm in love with you back then,
My Dietzenbach,
stranger, I don't know
if it's there forever.
But you became mine. "

Valeri Gourski lived in Dietzenbach in a caravan at the forest swimming pool outside the city. The state building supervisory authority and the municipal regulatory authority forced him to give up this domicile. Also, one day a gas bottle was ignited under his car. His skepticism about whether he could stay here permanently turned into fear. These circumstances prompted him to leave Dietzenbach in 1999 and relocate his life and artistic focus to Wiesbaden . Gourski painted many cityscapes, river landscapes, parks, squares, streets and house fronts in Wiesbaden, Mainz and Frankfurt am Main ; He portrayed a lot and drew nudes, as well as painting and drawing at vernissages , in restaurants, courtrooms, wine bars, bistros and libraries. His pictures adorn law firms, pharmacies, retail stores, restaurants, apartments, court corridors, judges' rooms, the Hessian state parliament in Munich, Frankfurt, Dietzenbach, Mainz and especially in Wiesbaden. In August 1999, ZDF reported on Valeri Gourski as part of the International May Festival .

In September 2006 he received an exit and re-entry permit from the German immigration authorities limited to three months in order to be able to visit his very old and seriously ill mother in the Ukraine. He traveled to Kovel in September 2006 and set out on the return journey in his car on December 13, 2006. In the village of Klwatka near the town of Radom in southeastern Poland , he was involved in a traffic accident that was fatal for him. He was buried in the new cemetery in Kovel.

Valeri Gourski art view

Valeri Gourski left an extensive painterly work. During his 16-year stay in Germany, he had created his main work, consisting of hundreds of paintings in a variety of formats and styles, but preferably in an Expressionist style, including city and genre scenes and countless portraits.

His view of art always followed a life out of proletarian experience, and for him art was in a sense a worship service. In view of his priestly activity it is not surprising that for him art has not moved out of the religious. Artistic representation without relationship to God meant meaninglessness to him. Valeri Gourski therefore understood his art as a prayer to God, as a work to arouse and uplift people and for the joy of God. In his (only) art-theoretical text, written in 1995 with the title Reflections on the Spiritual in Art , he wrote a. a .: "The size of art depends not only on abstract or pictorial thinking, but also on the degree of its relationship to the eternal."

Valeri Gourski stands for the self-sacrificing, combative, controversial sense of art in society and for art that unites people.

Works

Paintings and drawings

  • The Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main

  • Portrait of Ukrainka

  • Proletarian spring

  • Act 1996

  • The Stamp

  • The Russian Orthodox Church on the Neroberg Wiesbaden

Sculptures

  • Justitia and Minerva (Justizia)

  • Lady Justice and Minerva (Minerva)

  • Prophet Noa

  • Machine trunk

  • Aesculapian tribe

Reviews

Web links

Commons : Valeri Gourski  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b The sculptures by Valeri Gourski
  2. ↑ "Forest Spirit Tribe" back again . For its history, see Horst Schäfer's speech on May 27, 2015, which can be accessed on this page.
  3. ↑ The original text is in Russian; it was translated by the Russian journalist Olga Fefer.
  4. ↑ Valeri Gourski: Reflections on the Spiritual in Art , 1995
personal data
SURNAME Gourski, Valeri
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Гурський, Валерій (Ukrainian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian painter and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Kovel , Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 2006
Place of death Klwatka Królewska , Poland