About the artist

Oleg Tistol (b. 1960) – Ukrainian artist, born in Vradievka, Mykolaiv Oblast, Ukraine, and currently based in Kyiv, Ukraine. One of the most active representatives of the Ukrainian New Wave and trans-avant-garde art, Ukraine’s representative at the 22th and the 49th Venice Biennale (1994, 2001).

Tistol's art, which emerged at the edge of the Soviet and post-Soviet epochs, combined both a critique of Soviet culture with re-evaluation of its clichés, as well as the vital, joyful, and playful atmosphere, which largely defined the appeal of the “Ukrainian new wave”. Combining in his works the national and soviet symbols, myths and utopias he discovered for himself the notion of simulacrum — a copy with no original. Such a paradoxical self-sustainability of propaganda as substitution for the non-existing items unexpectedly unites propaganda with pop-art. Tistol was primarily interested in its formal aesthetic aspects - stencil plates, color back-ups, smoothly painted surfaces.

Tistol is attracted by its man-made environment, which transforms the landscape into the part of a culture, as the palm trees are not authentic Crimea's trees, they were planted here in the 20th century, forming its "new stereotype". The different techniques such as photo, painting, drawing, used in "U. B. K.", passed one into another. The project contains the pictorial paintings and the cycles of prints, where the pages of school notebooks, quick notes, casual sketches, supermarket's receipts, bills from the hotels and laundries, letters, the invitations on the passed exhibitions and the air-plane tickets are used as a background.