Naïve My Love: Ukrainian Folk Art of the 20th Century

Long before any academy trained a Ukrainian hand, doves, flowers, and family portraits were already appearing on the walls of village houses and the backs of painted furniture. Naïve My Love: Ukrainian Folk Art of the 20th Century gathers this overlooked chapter of art history into one volume: an encyclopedia of some forty self-taught painters and sculptors working across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each introduced through a short biography and paired with images of their wood painting, embroidery, carving, and decorative objects. Maria Prymachenko, the movement's most celebrated name, appears alongside dozens of lesser-known artists whose work shaped the avant-garde of Malevich, Exter, Delaunay, and Larionov, and still echoes through contemporary design. Ukrainian journalist Anna Lodygina, founder of Back to the Roots and former editor in chief of Elle Ukraine, writes the text; Kyiv-based curator Lidia Lykhach, founder of Rodovid Press, selected the works and shaped the book's framework, with creative direction from Mariia Gavryliuk and Natalia Kamenska of Gunia Project. For collectors who have studied every book on the masters, this is a chance to meet the untrained hands instead, artists who painted from instinct rather than instruction. To open Naïve My Love is to discover a country's private visual memory, unschooled, unclaimed, and entirely its own. This project was initiated by Gogola.