Maria Prymachenko’s exhibition opens at National Museum of Decorative Arts

The National Museum of Decorative Arts posted this on Facebook, Ukrinform reports.

“Visitors were not only impressed by the exhibition, which showcased approximately 60 previously unknown works by Ukraine's folk artist Maria Prymachenko from her early period, displayed in the museum’s halls for the first time, but they also enthusiastically explored the virtual gallery using ‘magic’ glasses,” the post reads.

Thanks to advanced technologies, 72 works from two of Prymachenko’s albums from the 1940s, previously accessible only as exhibition artifacts, can now be explored in detail. Moreover, visitors can interact with her ceramic works — not just touching them but also moving them virtually.

Museum Director General Liudmyla Strokova emphasized that this project was made possible by the digitization of artifacts, a process the museum team had been working on for six months using equipment donated by the @ALIPH Foundation with the support of the French Institute in Ukraine. The initiative was brought to life with the help of experts from eMuseum and Imersum, long-time collaborators of the museum.

Museum researcher and scholar of Prymachenko’s works, Olena Shestakova, explained that the selected pieces come from the museum’s unique collection, created between 1935 and 1938. These works were developed during Prymachenko’s studies at the School of Folk Art Masters and her work at the Experimental Workshops at the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Art. The artist created “cycles” of drawings using watercolor and later gouache, unifying them through sheet format, compositional structure, and specific color schemes according to her academic assignments.

A special guest at the event was Anastasia Prymachenko, the great-granddaughter of the globally renowned artist. She expressed her gratitude to the museum for preserving Maria Prymachenko’s creative heritage and noted that both the exhibition and virtual gallery would introduce “the unknown Maria” to a broader audience of admirers.

As reported earlier, on December 7, another exhibition opened in Kyiv, featuring photographs from the National Antarctic Scientific Center showcasing the nature of Antarctica.