Dmytro Maksymenko, Svitlana Ratoshnyuk, Oleksiy Sai. Studio

RA Gallery presents

STUDIO

Dmytro Maksymenko
Svitlana Ratoshniuk
Oleksiy Sai
Curator: Nadezhda Prydnich

04-17.07.2025
Opening on 04.07.2025 at 17:00

Artists Dmytro Maksymenko, Svitlana Ratoshniuk, and Oleksii Sai have been renting a studio together for over two decades. Having changed several locations, the artists stay together in any configuration of the space.

The studio space is fairly divided according to the specific needs of each artist, where no personal territory is hermetically isolated, but is open to prying eyes. In this way, the studio's fellow residents witness the process of creating works, and are in fact the first viewers and critics of the newborn work of art, which is both a privilege and a responsibility. In many cases, everyday discussions do not lead to significant changes in the work itself, but these endless artist small talks are the unnoticeable daily practice that gives rise to powerful creative impulses.

Everyone's routine is a series of separate paths that intersect in unexpected ways, and the interactions in this environment are not obvious and function as an exchange of information and technology. For example, the printing press in the center of the studio encourages spontaneous experiments with prints from time to time. The works existing in the studio are practically never finished, and a functional mode of constant revision is maintained.

In the alliance of Dmytro Maksymenko, Svitlana Ratoshniuk, and Oleksiy Sai, there is a somewhat atypical lack of competition and leadership, as well as a quorum in terms of basic ethical values. This did not change during the war. The visualization of a concentrated black shape can be called conditionally common. Dmytro Maksymenko's Fields Are Burning is a premonition of danger, Oleksiy Sai's News series of drawings is a means of living with the threat, and Svitlana Ratoshniuk's Silver Forest is a record of the consequences of the disaster.

Dmytro Maksymenko's graphic works – the Tale Tiles series and individual works from different years – mark the emphasized reduction of form to basic lines, creating a kind of visual document like a map or archive. These special acts of the modern ritual of survival are made in an elegantly restrained minimalist realization. The mathematical balance of the graphic works and objects, combined with perfection, balances between utilitarianism and sentiment, demonstrating the internal tension between the mechanization of processes and human presence.

Strange untold stories – this is the title of a series of textile works by Svitlana Ratoshniuk called Tears of Guadeloupe. The change in the status of advertising storyboards has an ambitious goal of preserving the labor doomed to destruction and creating new meanings. It is a fabric (literally as a material from which the works are created), a canvas of history, but not an epochal and pathos history, on the contrary - the history of an interval, a small moment, just like a bouquet of flowers captured in its agonizing stage of wilting, defining the interval rather than the result.

The works of Alexei Sai, presented in this project, are centered around graphic studies of gestures, rhythms and repetitions. "Landscapes Created by a Screwdriver" demonstrates the automatic creation of the automatic, a kind of romantization of a process in which meaning appears after the fact. "Statements" is a manifestation of control over information, executed in the aggressively neat manner of a typical mourner. The metal simulations of smoke puffs become a metaphor for an orderly disorder that is organically embedded in our everyday life, which is saturated with war.

The everyday coexistence of the artists in this studio is not a system of compromise, but a radical agreement to accept the Other. In the common space, it is not about the unity of style or idea – it is about a system of differences and strengthening of horizontal ties, which, in turn, leads to increased resilience.