Gallery Entry
The Guardians
By Julia Skrypnyk · UA
Polyptych `The Guardians` is a part of series `Shared weight` `Shared Weight` examines what happens to people when survival itself is at stake. The figures in these paintings do not act as individuals — they press together, hold each other up, bear a weight that none of them could carry alone. The work takes the archetype of the Atlas — from Greek mythology and architecture, the figure condemned to hold the sky — and transforms it into a collective image: not one body under pressure, but many. The series was born from a personal encounter with war in Ukraine, but it does not belong only to a specific time or place. It speaks to any society that has faced the threat of annihilation — and discovered, in that moment, an unexpected form of solidarity. Trauma here is not only destruction. It is also the ground on which people find one another. Cobalt-blue monochrome strips the figures of markers of time, nationality and skin — leaving only form, weight, and relation