Alexander Shevchuk is one of the bright but little-known Ukrainian artists of the 1990s working with photography. Shevchuk was born in 1960 in Odessa. He became interested in photography as a child: his mother was an amateur photographer. But he learned to shoot and work with equipment on his own. He graduated from the Odessa Engineering and Construction Institute; his narrative and thematic searches were influenced by artists from Kyiv and Odessa — Alexander Roitburd, Anatoliy Hankevich, Valeriya Trubina.

Alexander Shevchuk is often remembered as a documentary photographer who created a massive photo archive of the bohemian life of artists. However, his shots are not so much a document of rave or everyday life as a reflection on the artistic reality of that time.

For the first time, the public was able to see Shevchuk’s photos at Alexander Solovyov’s exhibitions “Calm” and “Summer” in Kyiv in 1992. Then his photographs were shown alongside works by the AES group, Alexander Hnylitsky, Oleg Holosi, Arsen Savadov, and Georgiy Senchenko.

In most of his series, Shevchuk turns to the female and male nude. In his early photographs, the body is usually androgynous, “sculptural”; the artist often makes references to mythology and the Ancient world.

For example, in the series “Artist’s Tomb,” the author flirts with the artistic environment, portraying Odessa authors — Anatoliy Hankevich, Alexander Roitburd, Leonid Voitsehov, Oleg Migas, Dmitry Ligerois, Dmitry Dulfan — as pharaohs and gods. Each hero of his photographic series is depicted surrounded by naked young men. Such emphasis on the artists, a certain queerness and carnivalesque convey the irony characteristic of Ukrainian Odessa art at the turn of the decades.

Another example of playing with art history was a series without a title (sometimes signed as “Homo — Asterius Games”), in which human naked bodies are presented as if they were ancient sculptures. The photographs painted in scarlet create a surreal perception and convey a certain mysticism. The author embodied a similar plot and idea in another series — “Garden and Park Sculpture.”

In Shevchuk’s early series, the naked body is shown rather as asexual, although sometimes there are elements of eroticism and even queer erotica. The artist was more interested in texture, composition, geometry, experiment. For example, his series “Heat-2” with naked models on the Odessa coast may seem sultry, but the attitude towards the body in these shots, despite sometimes too explicit poses, is not vulgarized. In some photographs, the body even merges with the hot sea shore, mimicking the sandy relief.

The search for composition led the author to create the series “Tic-Tac-Toe,” where the artist literally recreates the board game using human naked bodies.

However, from the mid-1990s, his “bodies” acquire traits of sexuality, and often even hypersexuality. The author increasingly turns to political and social themes, which he also reveals through nudity, but in a different, more radical way. His approach to shooting also changes: Shevchuk works more and more with digital photography and less with analog printing methods; color increasingly “seeps” into his photography.

The author increasingly turns to political and social themes, which he reveals through nudity.

In the 2000s, Alexander Shevchuk’s works often appeared in the cult magazine “NASH” alongside photographs by artists of the Kharkiv School of Photography and Nikolay Troha. Curatorial practice was also important for Shevchuk. He was one of the authors of the exhibition “NASHI,” dedicated to the artists of the “Paris Commune,” and a number of other projects.

With his photographic heritage, Shevchuk slips out of the conceptual textual and painterly Odessa context and, despite close ties with the scene, is an autonomous author.