Yury Kharchenko

Beauty embraces horror - concentrated colours and motifs with depth.

Yury Kharchenko is an outstanding representative of contemporary painting. He creates works in cycles which reflect his profound connections with existential themes like darkness and light. He combines masterful colourfulness with dense substance to create a unique pictorial language ranging from the poetic to the strident. This volume illustrates his works from the last six years lavishly, together with knowledgeable texts.

In our consumer society, is the culture of remembrance increasingly degenerating into an entertainment park? In a time of growing anti-Semitism and relativisation of the Holocaust, Yury Kharchenko's latest pictures demonstrate an explicitness and vehemence that are new to his work. He uses the vocabulary of Pop culture, of Disney and Hollywood, which he mixes with fantasies of violence containing taboo references to the Holocaust. The result is an artistic oeuvre which makes us look carefully and aims to galvanise.