ARTISTS from Ukraine

Top 3

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Ukrainian Artists of all time. This list of famous Ukrainian Artists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Nikolay Shmatko (1943 - 2020)

With an HPI of 52.13, Nikolay Shmatko is the most famous Ukrainian Artist.  His biography has been translated into 24 different languages on wikipedia.

Mykola Havrylovych Shmatko (Ukrainian: Микола Гаврилович Шматько; 17 August 1943 – 15 September 2020) was a Ukrainian sculptor and painter. He was born in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.

2. Sergei Sviatchenko (b. 1952)

With an HPI of 47.19, Sergei Sviatchenko is the 2nd most famous Ukrainian Artist.  His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Sergei Sviatchenko (born 1952) is a Danish-Ukrainian architect, artist, photographer and curator. He is a representative of the Ukrainian New Wave, that arose in Ukraine up through the 1980s. Initiator and creative director of the Less Festival of Collage, Viborg and Just A Few Works. He has lived in Denmark since the 1990s. Sviatchenko graduated from the Kharkov National University of Construction and Architecture in 1975, and in 1986 he obtained a Ph.D. at the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture. Sviatchenko is the son of architect Evgenij Sviatchenko (1924–2004), who was a professor of architecture and a member of the National Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, and engineer Ninel Sviatchenko (1926–2000). In 1975 Sergei Sviatchenko completed his architectural studies at the Kharkov National University of Construction and Architecture. Sergei Sviatchenko is especially oriented towards architecture's modern expressions, including Constructivism and the contemporary European Bauhaus movement. From his teacher, Professor Viktor Antonov, Sviatchenko was introduced to the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, and particularly his film Mirror from 1975 has left a thematic footprint in Sviatchenko's more recent collage art. After having worked as an architect for a number of architectural firms in Kharkov until 1983, Sviatchenko moved to Kyiv, where he graduated the master's program at the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, having completed his Ph.D. dissertation "Means to Visual Information in Architecture". In the 1980s he was one of the founders of the Soviart Center for Contemporary Art (Soviart) in Kiev and co-organizer and curator of the first Ukrainian exhibitions of contemporary art "Kiev-Tallinn" at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (1987), "Kiev-Kaunas" (1988), the first joint exhibition by Soviet and American artists (1988) and curated the first Ukrainian exhibitions in Denmark: "21 perceptions. Young Contemporary Ukrainian Artists" (1989), "Ukrainian Art 1960–80" (1990), "7 + 7" which was the first joint exhibition by Soviet and Danish artists (1990) and "Flash. A New Generation of Ukrainian Art" (1990). At the end of 1990 Sviatchenko moved to Denmark with his wife Helena Sviatchenko having been awarded an art scholarship. In the same year he began to participate in solo and group exhibitions.

3. Oksana Shachko (1987 - 2018)

With an HPI of 38.20, Oksana Shachko is the 3rd most famous Ukrainian Artist.  Her biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Oksana Shachko (Ukrainian: Оксана Шачко; 31 January 1987 – 23 July 2018) was a Ukrainian artist and activist. Along with Anna Hutsol and Alexandra Shevchenko, she was one of the founders of the radical feminist activist group Femen, which publicly demonstrates in various countries against sexual exploitation, income inequality, and policies of the Roman Catholic Church, among other causes.