BURLIN OLEKSANDR

Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (1971).

He was born on 10 August 1920 in Khvalynsk (Saratov region, Russia). His painting skills were noticed since his childhood but didn’t manage to develop them. At the age of thirteen, he remained an orphan, and at his 19, he became a soldier of the Red Army. He took part in the Second World War. The painter was awarded the war decorations.

In the post-war years, he lived and worked in Uzhhorod. It was in Transcarpathia that the artist was able to develop his creative gift, learning from outstanding artists such as Y. Bokshai, A. Erdeli, and G. Gluck. Learning from the experience of colleagues, he focused on the searching for his own style. Burlin also studied at the All-Union Correspondence Art Institute. In 1946-1949, he was an artist of the newspaper “Soviet Transcarpathia”. Since 1949, he worked in the design studios of the Transcarpathian Department of Art Fund of the USSR.

Being in Transcarpathian region, Oleksandr Burlin performed mainly landscapes – the whole canvased with single space, in the generalized realistic manner and selected colour palette. The works of the artist are youthfully clumsy, but how much sincerity, inner impulse and fleeting mood in these works. Life is complicated and controversial, says the author in his work “Eagles Flew Away From The Nest”. A new reality was affirmed: a young village has grown, it plays with greens and bright tiled roofs, children found their way into the big world, grown up in a lonely hut lost in the mountains; it would seem, here it is, the triumph of a new one! But ... in the old house, which gave life to the eagle tribe, desolation came…

In addition to landscapes, the author created genre canvases with complex plot lines. It is his painting "The Last Circle of Dante's Hell", depicting the camp of political prisoners of the 30s, the work of military subjects about the Battle of Stalingrad, in which the artist took part. And not by chance, obviously, at the republican exhibition in 1989, the viewers saw the canvas “Destruction of the Goddess Myth”, which the artist used for a long-time etude from life, recorded the secret removal from the pedestal of the monument to Stalin on the present Petofi square in Uzhhorod. Such works became a figurative expression of the artist’s own vision and understanding of the course of history.

The artist was a participant in regional (since 1951), republican and foreign (since 1969) art exhibitions. He held three solo exhibitions in Uzhhorod (1970, 1981, and 1991). His works were exhibited in Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

The artist’s works are stored at Transcarpathian Regional Art Museum named after Y. Bokshai (Uzhhorod), Museum of Modern Art of Ukraine (Kyiv), Collections of Sieghard Rasсhdorf (Kyiv), Khvalyn Art Memorial Museum (Russia) and private collections in Ukraine and abroad. 

Oleksandr Burlin died in 1994 in Uzhhorod.