ANATOLII
IVANENKO
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ANATOLII
IVANENKO
EN
Search
Contact
Romantic symbolism
1990-2000
Everydayness
2010-2015
Allegories
2016-2025
Anatolii Hryhorovych Ivanenko
Anatolii was born on September 30, 1950, in the town of Svatove, in eastern Ukraine.
His mother was Tetiana Ivanenko, and his father - Hryhorii Radchenko.
In 1956, Anatolii moved with his mother to live with his grandmother in the village of Petrivka (now
Rozkishne) near Luhansk. From an early age, his mother noticed her young son’s talent for drawing.
In 1965, after graduating from the local school and the Luhansk Children’s Art School,
Anatolii Ivanenko entered the Luhansk State Art College. In 1969, he became a student
at the Kyiv State Art Institute. After completing his studies, he moved to Rivne, the
hometown of his wife, Liudmyla.
Since 1975, he has been a teacher at the Rivne Children’s Art School. From that time on,
Anatolii Ivanenko has taken part in various art exhibitions and has held 12 solo exhibitions.
In 1982, he travelled to India - a journey that became a landmark in his creative life.
In 2011, for his artistic work, Anatolii Ivanenko was included in the Encyclopedia of Modern
Ukraine. In 2018, he was awarded the Order of Merit “For Services to the City of Rivne.”
For more than 50 years, the artist’s muse and inspiration has been his wife, Liudmyla.
The couple have a daughter, Hanna, and granddaughter, Mariia, who have both followed
in their father’s artistic footsteps, finding their own creative paths.
Find out more
Chapter 1
Romantic Symbolism
Romanticism is the soul’s freedom.
Only within the soul are we free from circumstances.
The symbol is a sign, a key, a multi-layered code - a passage
into the deeper layers of understanding a painting
If nothing in life happens by chance, then it was my journey
through India that changed me and changed everything. It gave
me a creative impulse. That was pure mysticism. While visiting
one of the temples, I felt an energy that pierced through me, rising
upward and then returning with even greater force. To this day, I cannot
explain what it was. And then came a strange, long dream. Some time
later, already back home, I began to see through an inner vision four
unusual paintings. They seemed complex and, at first, not entirely clear.
In them, I sensed a merging of the cosmic, the biblical, the mystical, and
the earthly.
When I began working on these paintings, I never expected the process to
last twelve years. I turned to photography as a tool to help me. There was
no way to avoid allegory after all, it’s impossible to express on canvas, in
a direct way, what fate is, what love is, what painting means, or what life
truly is.
This work became my answer to the questions that had long been
troubling me.
P.S. I worked with gratitude and with a deep sense of responsibility to the
One who noticed me from the corner of His eye.
The most beautiful nightmare within biological symmetry, or Adam and Eve. An allegory of love
People are like stars in the fourth metadimension, or Like Moses’s forty years of wandering. An allegory of destiny
Renaissance in catharsis, or The path to Golgotha. An Allegory of Painting
Bacchanalia in the temple, or The apocalypse. An allegory of life