The Pinchuk Art Centre

There’s this really rich Ukrainian guy, Pinchuk, who likes art and culture, so he opened his own modern gallery in the city centre with some of his millions. The gallery hosts some really famous artists and exhibits that normally the people of Kiev and Ukraine would not get to see them. The gallery is 100% free and is wicked air conditioned during the heat wave. The bathrooms are also way up there on the nicest I’ve ever seen list. My kids are always talking about this place, so for the day the topic was creativity; we all headed there to check it out.

Arunesh, one of the interns from India, was having a couple days break before he started his next school, so he got to come in the morning and talk about India with the kids for a little bit. I think they were really excited to hear from someone who wasn’t Canadian and learn about another country. He showed some amazing videos on Indian and now I want to go there even more. He also showed a hilarious Bollywood dance video from the early 1990s that the kids really liked.

We headed to Pinchuk. To come in you have to pass through security like at an airport. The exhibit was called Requiem. It’s by a famous British artist named Damien Hirst. His exhibit was called Requiem and it was awesome. In a city with so much history it’s been nice to go to old places like churches and other historic sites, but I was itching for some modern in your face art that makes you think. The only thing that was too bad was that you couldn’t take any photos, like most things indoors in Ukraine. I can’t show you any pictures of his work, but maybe they are online somewhere.

The exhibit had a theme of analyzing humanity and featured a lot of dead animals. There were also a lot of pieces with butterflies and house flies. There were really creepy paintings mostly in black with blue and white skeletons and other random objects. Many of the works were lots of something, like animal skeletons, medical equipment, pills. The kids were getting me to identify skeletons since they remembered I studied Biology. They also wanted to know what some of the medical equipment was, like the forceps. The piece with the pills was about how we frequently take drugs to cope with reality.

The weirdest work was of an almost real looking cow hung from its neck on a huge chain and hook. Its stomach was ripped open and all the guts were splattered on the floor. There was Iraqi money strewn all through the blood and it was called something like “the greed of mankind”. Some of the pieces were really beautiful though, like huge stained glassed windows of a church made from butterflies.