Russian Empire Naïve art
Iosif Artemievich Karalyan was a Soviet artist, member of the USSR Union of Artists and Honoured Artist of the Armenian SSR.
Karalyan's creative work is a kind of nostalgia for the country of childhood, which you can visit only in dreams and imagination, as it no longer exists, because childhood of every person, like his era, is unique, the unrepeatable sensations experienced, they are preserved visually only in the fine arts.
His works are kept in the Museum of Modern Art (Yerevan), National Gallery of Armenia (Yerevan), State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow), home-museum of Hovhannes Tumanyan (Yerevan), the funds of the Ministry of Culture of Armenia and numerous private collections in Armenia and abroad.
Nikifor Krynicki, born as Epifaniy Drovnyak, was a Lemko naïve painter. Nikifor painted over 40,000 pictures – on sheets of paper, pages of notebooks, cigarette cartons, and even on scraps of paper glued together. The topics of his art include self-portraits and panoramas of Krynica, with its spas and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Underestimated for most of his life, in his late days he became famous as a naïve painter.
Maria Oksentiyivna Prymachenko (Russian: Мария Авксентьевна Примаченко) was a Soviet and Ukrainian artist of the twentieth century. She is known as a bright representative of primitivism. Self-taught Maria Prymachenko painted more than 800 paintings during her long life.
Maria Prymachenko drew inspiration from folk folklore and filled her works with symbolic content. She achieved international recognition early on, but refused to move to the capital and lived all her life in her native village. In addition to painting, the artist was fond of embroidery and painted ceramics, as well as illustrated books by Ukrainian writers and poets.
People's Artist was in favor of the authorities. She was awarded with numerous honorary titles, orders and medals. Maria Prymachenko was constantly visited by well-known cultural workers. Her paintings were constantly exhibited at international exhibitions. Most of Prymachenko's paintings are now kept in the National Museum of Ukrainian Decorative Folk Art.
