Halyna Sevruk

Halyna Sevruk (Samarkand, 1929 – 2022) was a Ukrainian artist best known for her ceramics and mosaics. Her work often drew on Ukrainian history and culture, and her name is associated with the Sixtiers, a group of dissident intellectuals in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. She was born in Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan, to a family of Polish-Ukrainian background. The following year the family moved to Kharkiv, and in 1944 they settled in Kyiv. Sevruk studied painting with Hryhorii Svitlytskyi and Yurii Kyianchenko, and trained at the Shevchenko Art School and the Kyiv State Art Institute.

In the 1960s she worked as a decorator of buildings for the Art Fund and joined the Club of Creative Youth in Kyiv, founded by Les Tanyuk, where she found like-minded artists. In 1963 she completed The Forest Song, the first of several mosaics she would make, and in 1964 she also began working in ceramics, producing monumental pieces for institutions such as the Chorne More Hotel in Odesa and a sanatorium in Khmilnyk. From the late 1960s she illustrated several books of poetry in ink, among them a translated collection by Federico García Lorca.

In 1968 she signed the Letter of 139, in which intellectuals opposed the reversal of destalinization and the persecution of fellow artists. As a result she was expelled from the Union of Artists of Ukraine, her studio was closed, and for many years she was unable to exhibit in museums or galleries. She was reinstated to the Union in 1989. In the 1970s she experimented with new materials and painted a series of works paying tribute to people in her circle. In 1970 she created a monumental reinforced concrete stele, The Tree of Life, which was destroyed because it did not meet official aesthetic standards. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1984, at the house-museum of her former teacher, and a second followed in 1987 at a museum in Podil.

She received the Andrey Sheptytsky Art Prize in 1994, the Vasyl Stus Prize in 1991, and the title of Merited Artist of Ukraine in 2005. She died in 2022, aged 92. Her name remains linked to the defence of Ukrainian cultural identity against Soviet censorship, and in 2023 a street in Kyiv was renamed in her honour.