Grygoriy Okun
© Grygoriy Okun. Photo: Igor Karpenko, early 1990’s
About The Artist:
Grygoriy Okun (b. 1957) is currently living in Germany. From the mid-1980’s (when he took up art photography) till 2003 (when he left Ukraine) Okun was an active part of the Kharkiv photographic community. He first showed his work in 1987, at the milestone "F-87" exhibition, where the second generation of Kharkiv artists first claimed its place within the Kharkiv School.
Like many Kharkiv photographers Okun was mostly interested in social reportage. In Folk Portraits he would use a circular passe-partout to single out his characters from the background thus creating mock “classical” portraits of otherwise far from classical subjects.
The portfolio shown in this exhibition mainly demonstrates the straight documentary approach in Okun’s work, which relates his imagery to that of the Gosprom artists, even though Grygoriy Okun never formally belonged to the Gosprom group.
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