Pavlovych Yurii

Laureate of the Grand Prix of the XII International Hutsul Festival in Kosiv (2002), winner of the Art Prize named after Danylo Shcherbakivskyi (2004). Honoured Master of Folk Art of Ukraine (2005). Member of the National Union of Masters of Folk Art.

He was born on 10 May 1942 in Chynadiievo, Mukachevo district, Transcarpathia. His father's family comes from the Hutsul Brusturs. At the age of ten, at an exhibition in Rakhiv Yurii saw a carved casket of the famous master from Yasinia village Mykhailo Tulaidan and he couldn’t take his eyes off it. It was then that the desire to create something like this arose and the artist never betrayed that dream again.

After graduating from high school Yurii was working as a carpenter for a year. Later he served in the North Caucasus. He was preparing to enter the Lviv Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts, but he managed to do it only after the third try. He studied furniture and interior design.

In 1971, Yurii Pavlovych received an offer to work as a chief architect-engineer in Mukachevo. Instead, he took a job in Drachyno village at the art and souvenir factory. He worked in Svaliava region and Uzhhorod. After some time, he moved to Kosiv (Ivano-Frankivsk region), where at that time there were several art-production associations that combined a lot of well-known carvers. Kosiv, according to Yurii, became his main university. It was here that, besides production work, the artist performed various creative projects which since the late 70s appeared at exhibitions not only in the native region but also in Kyiv and Moscow.

Then, he began to receive orders. The first work of Y. Pavlovych was a wooden case with inlay for a porcelain vase decorated with gold leaf. It was presented to the then-general secretary by the leadership of Czechoslovakia in the late 70s. However, as the journalist Anna Hrapeniuk wrote, “he did not become a “court” master – he stayed in his mountains. During various governments and regimes. He didn’t want titles and medals. He was voluntarily addicted to the gallery called Art”.

Thematic, as well as genre ranges of the author, are wide enough. Among his masterpieces, there are genre and ornamental compositions, plates, hunting kits, wood choppers, and sticks. The master inlaid rifles, pistols, shepherd's axes, candlesticks, horns – something similar is difficult to find even at the museums. He used a nickel silver (new silver) – inclusions of metal in wooden products. In addition, the artist created a gallery of national heroes of Ukraine, directly or indirectly and metaphorically depicted. Among them – Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Shukhevych, Avhustyn Voloshyn, Oleksa Dovbush, Stepan Klochuriak, Andrei Sheptytskyi, Ivan Mykolaichuk, Ivan Chendei, Petro Skunts, Serhii Paradzhanov and others.

A writer, scientist Adelia Hryhoruk told about the creativity of Pavlovych as follows: “Being brought up on the decorative and applied art of the coryphaei of Hutsul's woodcarving, Yurii Pavlovych organically managed to combine two different trends: observance of inflexible, normatively established laws of classical art and ability to respond to the problems of contemporary social reality, to find an adequate figurative and emotional reproduction of events and phenomena of life.” The combination of these two trends – the use of ancient traditions and compliance with the spirit of the times – is extremely appealing in his art. As a result, as noted by art historians, Yurii Pavlovych as a successor to the glorious traditions of the carvers of Shkribliak-Korpaniuk, created his own school of Hutsul carvings.

Since the end of the 1970s, Yurii Pavlovych has been an active participant in exhibitions of various levels: from regional to national and all-union. The first personal exhibition of the artist took place in 1983 at the Kolomyia Museum of Folk Art of Hutsulshchyna and Pokuttia named after Y. Kobrynskyi. Thus, he had personal exhibitions in Kolomyia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Uzhhorod, Kyiv, and Moscow.

In 2010, it was published a book “Yurii Pavlovych: to be yourself” (2010) and an art album “Yurii Pavlovych: confession of the soul” (2014).

On 14 November 2014, a private museum of Hutsul carvings of Yurii Pavlovych was opened in the centre of Rakhiv.

Y. Pavlovych's works are kept in private collections in Ukraine, the USA, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, and Sweden.

Yurii Pavlovych lives and works in Rakhiv.