About the artist

Illya Chichkan is a Ukrainian contemporary artist. He was born in August 29, 1967 in Kyiv. He is a representative of the New Wave in Ukrainian art. His father, Arkady Chichkan, is a Ukrainian nonconformist artist, a participant in the legendary Exhibition of 13 (1979), which was a manifestation of the passive resistance of Ukrainian painting to socialist realism. Ilya Chichkan’s children, David and Oleksandra, are also known as young contemporary Ukrainian artists. In the 1990s, Chichkan’s name was associated with the New Wave art movement, which emerged as a Ukrainian manifestation of transavant-garde art (one of the trends in early postmodern art), as well as a reaction to key changes that came after perestroika. In 1988-1989, Chichkan and a small group of other artists, including Oleksandr Hnylytsky, Maksym Mamsykov, Vasyl Tsagolov, Valeria Trubina, Yuriy Solomko, and Ilya Isupov, founded a group called the Paris Commune, named after Kyiv Street. Paris Commune (now – St. Michael’s), which housed the famous squat, which served as a home for most of them, a workshop and meeting place. The art of the “Paris Commune” of those years was dedicated to protesting against the bureaucratic cultural institutions that remained from Soviet times. The squat lasted until 1993.