TARAS LOBODA

Taras Loboda was born on May 4th, 1961 in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, into the family of I.I.Loboda, famous ukrainian artist. He graduated from the Institute of Art in Kiev (1979-1985). In 1979 he attended well-known Zaretsky's Studio. He is a participant of many international, republican, all-Soviet Union exhibitions. Since 1993 he has been living and working in Prague (Czech Republic). 

Taras Loboda was born on May 4th, 1961 in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, into the family of I.I.Loboda, famous ukrainian artist. He graduated from the Institute of Art in Kiev (1979-1985). In 1979 he attended well-known Zaretsky's Studio. He is a participant of many international, republican, all-Soviet Union exhibitions. Since 1993 he has been living and working in Prague (Czech Republic). He is a painter creating thematic compositions, portraits, landscapes, still-lives. Presently living and working in Prague, the artist persistently and purposefully develops three main motives: woman's portrait and act (body with melodious lines, a look with a sad solitude feeling), strict classic still life and a phantom landscape. 

Objects painted by the artist intrigue, attract due to their escaping mysteriousness. Taras Loboda, an excellent graphic artist and painter with rich fantasy and a developed decorative flair, is usually trying to look beyond the front side of things, to penetrate through the Looking-Glass of Alice, to the time and space which are aloof from the people whenever he pictures a beautiful stranger or flowers boiling up above the smooth surface of porcelain and copper or else luxurious paradise bushes above the frozen lakes. That is why his still-life pictures, perfected in a masterly fashion and with a high grade of illusiveness are filled with enchanting radiance, and lit up with a light from another world and that is why so terribly cold (like an ice crystal). In women portraits there are splendidly aesthetic female figures - naked or draped into heavy dense cloth. In Loboda's landscapes the gloomy masses of vegetation in the foreground emphasize the wild colorful vegetation in the background.

The world being created by him is a world of stiff and motionless apparitions, rather cold and in most cases looking as if devoid of emotional coloring. It is the world of obvious reservations, piercing reticence when everything is stopped half a step before understanding, a moment before the solution. The artist literally draws the spectator here, pulls him out of the every day environment. As to seducing the spectator by supporting in him inner nervousness, a stained expectation, Loboda is very good at that.

He succeeds in all three lines of his creative work because his works are qualitative and interesting for the public. Taras Loboda has been excellently trained from the technical point of view and is able to solve any graphic problems off-hand. It seems there are no unsolvable complications for him in painting. He easily shapes the form of the things, selecting paints according to a contrast principle, freely achieving the expressive radiance and sonority. The color of his paintings transmits convincingly both substance and feeling.

The most interesting begins when the artist is matured, when he has worked out his recognizable style: a restless and captivating "color-line-feeling" game when game's everyday is mixed on the canvas and leads to new and new turns, search and finding revelations. Having what to say and knowing how to say it, Loboda has found his place in the European post-modernist art space and consistently defends it.

Maxim Antipov