Ada Rybachuk

Ada Rybachuk (Kiev, 1931 - Kyiv, 2010) was a Ukrainian muralist, painter, sculptor and architect. Working in the postwar Soviet Union, she was closely associated with her husband, Volodymyr Melnychenko, and the two shared much of their output. She is remembered mainly for her works on Arctic themes and for the Memory Park in Kyiv.

Born in Kiev, she spent the war with her family, who were evacuated to Kazakhstan, where she finished primary school. She studied at the Taras Shevchenko Higher School of Art in Kiev, graduating with highest honours and a gold medal, and then at the Kiev State Art Institute, led by Oleksii Shovkunenko. Her listed teachers include Victor Ivanovich Zaretsky. A summer practice in Vylkove, in the Danube Delta, under Sergei Grosh, produced sketches that led to her first commission, illustrations for Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak's 'Reindeer Fairy Tales'.

From 1954, after her first trip north, she and Melnychenko made several long journeys to the Arctic, living and working there for roughly seven years in total. They produced graphic series, linocuts and children's book illustrations about the Arctic landscape and the lives of its people. In 1957 she completed the sculpture 'Shipboy', showing a young man leaning on a rope ladder as if watching the sea from a ship, and that year she won a silver medal at the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students. With the architect Avraam Miletsky she also began a Memory Park at the crematorium on Baykoy Hill, covering 2,000 square metres and including several very large sculptures. Authorities covered the work in concrete in 1982, and Israel Goldstein's documentary 'The Wall' (1988) followed the campaign to restore it.

Rockwell Kent praised their work in the preface to the second Russian edition of 'Salamina'. Her work was exhibited in Czechoslovakia, the United Arab Republic, Finland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Poland, Norway and the United States. After her death, an exhibition of her works was held in 2013 at the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture in Kyiv, and in 2019 another, titled 'Island', presented work from the 1950s to the 1970s.