Artists do not like such pompous words as “European integration,” but they gladly integrate at the first opportunity.

Ukrainian artists in the Netherlands are presented by the Foundation for the Promotion of Arts Development gallery and the Embassy of Ukraine in the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Amsterdam). The exhibition takes place in Amsterdam, Marius van Bouwdijk Bastiaansestraat 28, and from October 3 to 26 the works can be seen at the Stichting WG Kunst gallery.

Last year, works by contemporary Dutch artists René van Kempen and Jos van Tubergen were exhibited in Kyiv. They really liked the sights of our capital and Odesa, houses, embroidered shirts, and dumplings in Pyrohiv, and generally the picturesque nature of our country. Now friends and colleagues meet on the land that gave the world such famous artists as Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

The name of the creative association “H.V.K.” consists of the first letters of the artists’ surnames, each of whom came to use digital technology in their works in their own way.

Modern society widely uses progressive technologies primarily in the entertainment industry, consumer goods advertising, and other commercial purposes. The group “H.V.K.” sets itself the complex task of finding a place for truly artistic creativity in this well-established machine, not just applied service to commerce, which many designers, directors of “tasty” clips, etc., are forced to engage in. Using the mentioned aesthetic manifestations as documents of the time, the artists deprive them of pragmatic functionality in their compositions.

Thus, Olena Holub’s prints are mostly “directed” in a cognitive vector. Each of her digital sheets is created on the border of temporal and mental intersection, drawn from the history and present of Ukraine. She mixes scenes from street life, where teenagers write graffiti, passers-by enjoy hot dogs against the backdrop of majestic monuments erected in the urban space to outstanding philosophers of the past, masters of words, brush, and classical music.

Hlib Vysheslavskyi’s photo works explore the interaction of the domestic, intimate manifestation of personality in public space. Compositions with laundry drying in the yard unfold an epic story of human existence. They emphasize the vulnerability and temporariness of the warmth of freshly worn clothes in a magnificent architectural ensemble created for the needs of society, where more than one generation of such creatures lived: children, youths, girls, women, men, and finally, feeble old people without signs of gender…

Volodymyr Kharchenko’s digital metagraphies capture significant moments from the urban environment as if an instantaneous, fleeting but powerful, like lightning, contact between the individual and society occurs. The flow of street life, where everyone is rushing in many affairs and without affairs, obeying the rhythm, still allows the manifestation, albeit momentary, of eternal poetry, which, transformed, lives in the thoughts and works of the artist of the new millennium.