Last Updated on 07/09/2024 by Arun jain
As Ukrainian troops began pushing the Russians back outside the city of Kharkiv in May 2022, Gamlet Zinkivskiy, a street artist who knew how to shoot as well as paint, was eager to fight for his homeland.
So Mr. Zinkiewicz, who before the war had often lived in a firing range, joined a volunteer unit defending a city in eastern Ukraine. But the battalion leader had other plans for his skills.
“Gamlet, just pick up your paint brush, and go paint in the street,” Vsevolod Kozemiako, commander of the volunteer Khartia battalion, told him. “Because the power of his art is much stronger than attacking with a machine gun or defending a trench. His art can empower the people who defend the city.”
Although skeptical, Mr. Zinkiewicz obliged and began painting in the bombed-out and deserted streets of Kharkiv, wearing a bulletproof vest where he tucked painting tools.
One of his first works, a plywood panel covering a broken door in the city hall, featured Molotov cocktails – homemade weapons that residents prepared to defend Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
“Hell’s hospitality,” he wrote on the mural.
Soon, he said, volunteers and soldiers would stop in the streets where he worked and say to him, “Gamlet, we like your work—keep it up!”
“That’s when I realized how much people needed it,” he said during an interview in Kharkiv.
The city, just 25 miles from the Russian border, Damaged by Russian bombing Since the war began, including in recent days When Russian missiles and bombs hit residential and shopping areas, at least six people were killed and nearly a hundred more were injured.
The positive response to his work inspired Mr. Zinkiewicz, 34, to paint dozens more murals in cities across eastern Ukraine, capturing the harsh realities of wartime in his paintings, depicting everything from blood donors. Lines of people getting food for Fatigue grips the citizens.
In eastern cities freed from Russian occupation, destroyed buildings and bridges have become his new canvases, as he transforms remnants of destruction into symbols of resilience amidst horror.
“It’s my huge gallery,” Mr. Zinkiewicz said. “The best gallery possible.”
Born to a journalist mother and father who worked as an architect and jeweler, Mr. Zinkiewicz was immersed in culture from an early age.
At university, he adopted the nickname Gamelet, a transliteration of Hamlet in Russian, because he often recited Svalokovs from the play to fellow students. Eventually, it became his official first name.
Expelled from his art academy for resisting the rigid classical style demanded by the professors, Mr. Zinkiewicz struck out on his own and began painting without permission on buildings around Kharkiv.
There, he honed his signature black-and-white minimalist style, often depicting solitary figures or objects set against empty spaces. He accompanies his pictures with captions that often read like poetry or philosophy.
With more than 100 of his murals appearing on building facades, doors and windows, Mr. Zinkiewicz’s work has become an integral part of the city.
“Kharkiv has many important cultural figures, and he is definitely one of them,” said local architect Maxim Rosenfeld.
Before the war, Mr. Zinkiewicz’s art, some of which he sold to collectors to support his spartan lifestyle, reflected everyday themes such as loneliness and the passage of time. After Russia’s invasion began in February 2022, his attention turned to the profound changes the war had brought about in people’s daily lives.
Depicting the mass exodus of Kharkiv’s population at the start of the war – nearly half a million residents fled – he painted a set of keys with the caption: “The keys miss their doors.”
Another mural shows a soldier’s gear — helmet, flak jacket and rifle — which he calls “talismans of modernity.”
“His street art is more than art. He’s documenting the reality around him,” said Anton Shtuka, a photographer and filmmaker who recently released a documentary on Mr. Zinkiewicz.Warning! Life goes on“
“His work is like a time stamp,” Mr. Shtuka said.
Standing next to the Molotov cocktail mural on Kharkiv’s city hall, Rimma Hurina, a 67-year-old retiree, said the painting “preserves the memory” of Kharkiv’s early days of resistance during the war. “It’s about the struggle for Kharkiv, the fight for freedom.”
Like most residents of Kharkiv, Mr. Zinkivskiy is a native Russian speaker. But he has made a point of writing all the captions on his new murals in Ukrainian, and has decided to rewrite what was done in Russian before the war – reflecting a broader social change. Many Ukrainians switch from Russian to Ukrainian.
Not all of his murals met with approval. A painting that suggested war-weary civilians whose fatigue paled in comparison to the sacrifices of soldiers has sparked a backlash on social media. Some residents have objected to his focus on the grim realities of war, calling his artwork depressing.
“Please paint something pretty, like flowers or babies,” Mr. Zinkiewicz recalled an elderly woman pleading one day, as he drew guns and knives at the gate of her residential block.
“I don’t want to paint smiling children or beautiful flowers. It’s war!” He said he answered.
After the eastern Ukrainian cities of Izium and Kupyansk were liberated from Russian occupation in the fall of 2022, Mr. Zinkiewicz rushed there, eager to see what had become of his pre-war murals.
In Isium, he said, what affected him the most was the reception he received from residents who survived hiding in basements for months, fearing to be killed by Russian soldiers. (A mass grave with more than 400 bodies was later found near the city.) Now free, residents told him, he asked to paint in the streets, hoping his art would lift his spirits.
With more than 80 percent of Izium’s buildings destroyed or damaged by the fighting, According to local authoritiesHe painted on the ruins.
On a recent afternoon at Isium, Mr. Zinkiewicz, who wears multiple rings on his fingers and smokes a cigarette held between his lips, refreshed a mural he painted a year ago, Emergency backpacks that people keep ready.
Carefully, he pulled back the white lines of the drawing, drawn over a door riddled with shrapnel holes. It was the only part of the once bustling social center still standing. The roof of the building had collapsed, and piles of bricks were scattered on the floor.
On the pier of the bridge, badly damaged by the bombing but still used by local residents, Mr. Zinkiewicz painted the words “broken, but invincible.” Although the pier eventually collapsed into the river, the message of resilience has stuck in the minds of the community.
In Isium, some residents said their work symbolized the city’s recovery. A 12-year-old girl stood still for nearly half an hour as she watched Mr. Zinkiewicz paint on a gate between two ruined buildings; She said it brought beauty to a landscape of destruction.
Oleksandr Cheban, a 36-year-old businessman, took a selfie with Mr. Zinkiewicz when he recognized him painting on the street. “He’s showing people that we’re still alive,” Mr. Cheban said. “You see, everything is broken, but we live.”
Post Street artist documents war in Ukraine, one stark mural at a time appeared first New York Times.