Eduard Gudzenko (1938–2006) was a Ukrainian expressionist artist. He was largely unknown to the general public during his lifetime, due to the unconventional style and subject matter, which diverged from official expectations. Gudzenko was rediscovered in the 2000s.
Gudzenko was born in Cherkasy, Ukraine in 1938. During his lifetime, Gudzenko's attempts to exhibit his work were criticized, both by official authorities and by colleagues in the shop. Later, the artist was accused of Jewish cosmopolitanism, in particular, for the work "Self-Portrait in a Yarmulke", exhibited in the Cherkasy Gallery in 1980. Gudzenko had only one personal exhibition, in 1987.
His art is really his work only after his death. In many respects, it is the merit of his faithful and persistent admirers who managed to organize his first personal exhibition in 2007 (a year after his death), which took place in his hometown, at the Cherkasy Art Museum. In 2008, his works were shown in Kyiv.
In 2014-2015, Russian connoisseurs of fine arts were able to get acquainted with the works of the Ukrainian artist for the first time. This became possible thanks to the exhibition of his works, which were presented to the general public in the Marble Hall of the Russian Museum, in St. Petersburg. In 2017, a solo exhibition was held in the halls of the art gallery of Zurab Tsereteli, the department of the Russian Academy of Arts, in Moscow. The retrospective exposition presented more than 70 works. The exhibition consisted of several thematic blocks and covered the artist's work from early sketches of the late 1950s, graphic sketches, to his latest canvases of the early 2000s. On meter canvases landscapes and still lifes, portraits, genre scenes and decorative fantasies.
Art historians note that for the works of this provincial artist such features are inherent, such as - a broad brush, a pasty brushstroke, an open color. His works are fundamentally different from ethnographic painting and from the official art of that period.
Alexander Yakimovich (Doctor of Arts, Art historian, and full member of the Russian Academy of Arts) :"Looking at his paintings and drawings, one would be hard put to guess that the person who created them had such a hard life. In his works Gudzenko appears to be a free artist in the very same sense as was posited by the Renaissance artists. The artist, inexorably greedy for visual impressions, was passionately emotional and ready to splash onto a canvas his impressions and experiences. The artist’s eye was designed in such a way that he saw drama and comedy and tragedy in combinations of color hues; he saw irony and sarcasm in the texture of a brushstroke, in combinations of forms. His soul and mind were directly connected to his eye, and his eye to his hand. The free and creative nature, as described in Goethe’s Faust, is a curious and mistrustful personality that looks intently at real life and reveals its hidden aspects to people. It has no fear, and refuses to consider standards, prohibitions, and canons of official ideologies as something binding.[1] "
Eduard Gudzenko's official website