Regina Show Marks Ukrainian Immigration

×

Expand

Dmytro Stryjek, "Self-portrait," 1984

mixed media on card, 12.25" x 12" Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, gift of Peter Millard. Photo by Don Hall

The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina marks the 125^th anniversary of Ukrainian immigration to Canada with a show, Found in Translation, by the late Dmytro Stryjek, a Saskatchewan artist who began painting in earnest only after he retired. Born in Ukraine in 1899, Stryjek immigrated to Canada in 1923 after serving in the Ukrainian army. He then worked for the Canadian National Railway for 38 years. “His paintings are astonishingly inventive and hauntingly lyrical,” art historian Daria Zelska-Darewych writes in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. “A brilliant colorist, Stryjek achieves a freshness that seems inexhaustible, and challenges accepted ideas of untutored painting as separate from mainstream art.” Stryjek’s work cuts across two cultures. His subjects include Ukrainian poets, icons and churches, but also Western pop stars, politicians and landscapes.

Dmytro Stryjek, "Russia’s Michail Gorbachev Meeting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher," 1985

Dmytro Stryjek, "Taras Schevchenko, Ukrainian Poet," 1981

Stryjek was included in a 1975 group show at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatchewan Primitives. Then, in 1988, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery organized a retrospective, Trying the Colours, which travelled to the MacKenzie. Peter Millard, an English professor at the University of Saskatchewan, championed Stryjek. In 1999, the MacKenzie acquired 378 works, by purchase and donation, from Millard’s collection, making the gallery the largest depository of Stryjek’s work. Found in Translation continues to April 23.