Pshechenko Yevmen

Pshechenko Yevmen

Yevmen was born in Verbivka village, Kamianka district, Cherkasy oblast, in 1880. Some say that, together with brother Pavlo, he participated in the revolutionary movement, spent five years in prison for keeping the prohibited literature and was released with a poor health condition on the eve of World War I.

Since 1914, he worked in his native village at the artel of applied and decorative arts organized by Nataliia Davydova in 1900. Folk artists worked there together with avant-garde painters – Aleksandra Ekster, Liubov Popova, Nina Genke-Meller, Kseniya Boguslavskaya, Ivan Puni, Georgi Yakoulov.
He started with helping his wife with sketches for embroideries and gradually switched to an independent activity. Unlike other painters, Yevmen Pshechenko neither dated, nor named his works, only signed them, so most of them are called Decorative Picture in inventory books.

He made his debut as a painter at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art. Embroideries and Carpets by Painters’ Sketches in Moscow Lamersie Gallery together with other artists from the Verbivka artel in 1915. It presented his three embroidered pillows and 32 embroidery sketches. Yevmen Pshechenko also participated in The Second Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art “Verbivka” (Moscow, 1917) as well as exhibitions Modern Ukrainian Rural Art (Kyiv, 1919) and The Art of Peoples of the USSR (Moscow, 1927).

Pshechenko painted mostly flower compositions – bouquets, garlands, flowerpots, chimerical animals and birds, sometimes intertwined his flower compositions with such agricultural tools as a scythe or rake and later – with Soviet stars. He combined the idea of modern and the folk art in his works.

He died in 1933.