Biographically and historically, Boyarov could have been a modernist or, at the very least, a postmodernist. He earned an architecture degree at Lviv Polytechnic. From 1987 to 1989, he hung out in a squat on Furmannaya Street in Moscow, where he traveled with Andriy Sagaidakovsky to exhibitions of Rauschenberg, Bacon, Twombly, and other stars of world art. From 1989 to 1991, Boyarov was an auditor at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn and at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki; during the same time in Tallinn, he worked in radio and newspapers. In 1991, he lived in Warsaw.

Boyarov started with painting, but in the large-format paintings typical of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he primarily saw a photographic nature. The interaction of painters with reality usually consists of copying it by means of painting — Boyarov, however, chose the camera and video camera as his tools.

Thus, his creative path turned somewhat toward the Picture Generation and took the form of what art historian Hal Foster later called the “archival impulse.”

Boyarov’s video works, which he began creating as soon as he gained access to equipment, are based on the fundamental critique of the mass-cultural media flow on television screens pioneered by international media art in the 1960s. The act of appropriating the television broadcast for the artist has the character of deconstruction, breaking down into frames, re-editing accompanied by eerie stretched sound.

But in the work “Once and Now-2” there is a significant aspect related to cultural memory. The artist used footage from the film “Vallatud kurvid” (Mischievous Curves), one of whose directors, Kaljo Kiisk, played a major role in the cultural life of Tallinn — an important city for Andriy Boyarov. Thus, through private biographies, a connection arises between cities, countries, and historical narratives. By appropriating an image (moving or still) that has authorship, Boyarov not only reconstructs its meaning in a certain historical context but also asserts his right to use this image.

By appropriating an image (moving or still) that has authorship, Boyarov not only reconstructs its meaning in a certain historical context but also asserts his right to use this image.

Blue box

In the late 1980s in Tallinn, Boyarov found a box of negatives belonging to an unknown amateur author in the trash. These photos tell the story of a child’s growth from birth to adolescence. The artist reprinted the photographs in various ways, studying the history of a family unknown to him. This was the first act of image appropriation, which later became an important component of Andriy Boyarov’s artistic method. He named the series “Blue Box” and returned to it from time to time over two decades before showing it in 2015 at the Closer art center in Kyiv.

Individual fragments of the series were presented at several group exhibitions. Each time, Boyarov, choosing how the presentation would be (varying the printing method and base, sizes, images duplicated and overlapped), changed the narrative. The artist explored the private archive of a family unknown to him through the concept of individuation, one of the fundamentals in Carl Jung’s teachings: it means the process of personality formation, a psychological development in which individual talents and unique features of a person are realized.

The work provokes discussions about authorship. Critic Vasyl Lozynskyi notes: “A certain feature is that we do not receive any message about the author of the photos, details of the find, or the method of selecting the photographs. Such an approach would already be curatorial, and this can be explained by the fact that artistic practice today feels a lack of such an approach, and the artist Boyarov thematizes this lack, becoming a curator-artist who exhibits a total installation.”

The example of the “Blue Box” series shows how over twenty years his creative method crystallized, based on appropriation and reuse of images, with the object most often being photography or video.

Sense of reality

In the “Flora” series, Boyarov re-photographed pictures of flowers from magazines and other printed media and reproduced them using silver gelatin printing. With this artistic gesture, he transformed photography, which had an illustrative function, into an image, a picture. That is, if the flower was objectified by the camera, Boyarov objectified the photograph itself, depriving it of its primary purpose, color, and gloss. He demonstrated all its graininess, noise, and blur.

At the COPY/PAST exhibition at the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Boyarov again used this method, but the focus was no longer on photography as a “bare” medium but on the problematics of studying and preserving the archives of artists who worked in Lviv in the first half of the 20th century. He turned to archival photos of pre-war figures, including Janina Miezecka, Witold Romer, Noe Lissa, and Władysław Bednarczyk. The gesture of giving voice to forgotten names was amplified by scaling — Boyarov enlarged the images, emphasizing the importance of these works not included in the history of Lviv art.

From this principle grew Andriy Boyarov’s research and curatorial activity. Since 2017, he has acted as organizer, curator, co-curator, and consultant for several exhibitions and programs. These include the exhibitions “Montages. Deborah Fogel and the New Legend of the City” at the Museum of Art in Łódź, which received the highest museum award Sybilla; Knowns — Unknowns at the Zamenhof Center in Białystok; “Experiment! Masters of Lviv Photography of the Early 20th Century and Their Followers in Ukraine and Poland in the 20th–21st Centuries” in Łódź; the program “Culture (without) gaps — Avant-garde Days in Lviv dedicated to the anniversary of Tommaso Filippo Marinetti’s visit”; the exhibition “Futuromarzenia” at the Mystetskyi Arsenal; and a number of solo exhibitions. Boyarov consistently sought the roots of local Lviv art, exploring multidisciplinary connections in culture, tracing influences and biographical coincidences.

Andriy Boyarov’s creative output is coherent, free from situational, reactive works; all contingencies are fully controlled by the artist. He consciously does not put a full stop to some series, returning to them for decades.

Thus, Scopic Regimes is compiled from works created between 1993 and 2013. The title appeals to the concept of “scopic regime,” proposed by film theorist Christian Metz. It primarily concerns the peculiarities of visual perception and the distance between the image and the viewer. The reference to this term provides a key to understanding what exactly Boyarov did with the images in his series. Repeatedly re-photographed, recopied, borrowed from numerous media, detached from a specific moment, political, historical, cultural contexts — he shows them to the viewer so that the distance becomes visible. The artist achieves this by “cleansing” the image of connections with a certain reality, bringing it almost to abstraction. Thanks to this, he gives the viewer the opportunity to build their own version of reality around the images and their combinations.

“An important aspect of Boyarov’s creativity,” noted art historian and curator Bohdan Shumilovych, “is the attempt to feel reality, which is constantly realized in reconstructing the past and anticipating the future, a reality that flows (like a media stream) or exists (like a photo album or book) in the observer’s time.”

Andriy Boyarov’s creative output is coherent, free from situational, reactive works; all contingencies are fully controlled by the artist.