Long Live 8th of March!

Oksana Pavlenko was the student of the Mykhailo Boichuk’s monumental art workshop. Artists of this group worked on their own “national” style based on the combination of Byzantine art, renaissance of the Ukrainian icon painting and the search for the universal visual language. Long live 8th of March! is one of the most famous works by Oksana Pavlenko. The painting, on one hand, tells about revolutionary events at the beginning of 20th century and the women’s fight for their rights, and, on the other, embodies Mykhailo Boichuk’s artistic method. Depicted women are incredibly similar to each other in the same peasant clothing and they act as a united front, thus manifesting the principle of the collective’s dominance over the individual. This is a social group fighting for its rights. In this work one can also see the personal, quite tragic story of Oksana Pavlenko, for whom the changes caused by the revolution opened the opportunities for the professional art, but also brought the loss of almost all the loved ones, colleagues and friends.