ILKO Gallery

Ivan Ilko turned 75 in March 2013, and his family marked it by building him a gallery. It opened on the 16th of that month with a retrospective of his painting, hung across 600 square metres on two floors of a new building on a residential street north of the centre. More than 500 guests came, some 60 musicians played, and the evening ended with a jazz piano set.

His son Mykhailo had filled large rooms before — he won the tender for the design work on Ukraine's 2005 Eurovision Song Contest — and Mykhailo's wife Tetiana, an architect, drew the plans. What the two of them produced is a gallery with a concert hall inside it, sound-treated to European concert-hall standards, with the old painter's own studio in the same building. One thing to settle before you plan around it: the gallery's website now carries a standing notice that the art centre is temporarily not operating.

Three Ilkos and a building

The name on the door belongs to a working dynasty rather than a dead one. Ivan Ilko was born in 1938 in Dulove, a village in the Tiachiv district, and came up through the Uzhhorod School of Applied Arts in the 1950s under Yosyp Bokshai, Adalbert Erdeli, Fedir Manailo and Anton Kashshai — the generation that made Transcarpathian painting into a school with a name. He was made a People's Artist of Ukraine in 2018.

Putting his studio inside the gallery was the decisive choice. It keeps the place from behaving like a white cube rented by the fortnight: the paintings on the walls and the work being made in the building belong to the same household.

Six hundred square metres, tuned

The building was purpose-built for the job, which is not something you can say of most regional venues in Ukraine. The ground floor takes the exhibitions, with proper hanging systems and gallery lighting. Upstairs is a hall for about 200 people, a small bar, and acoustics specified to concert-hall norms; a multi-camera rig streamed what happened there live.

Two floors mean two things can run at once, or one large project can be given the air it needs — an exhibition and a string quartet on the same evening, in the same house.

Exhibitions you could hear

Painting, sculpture and contemporary art carried the exhibition programme, with shows usually hanging a month or more. Everything else was music, lectures, literary evenings and master classes. The opening bill gives the flavour: the Transcarpathian folk band Hudaky, the chamber choir Cantus, a violin orchestra under Olena Korolenko, then Tetiana Shabanova at the piano.

Students from the art academy defended diploma work in the rooms where sought-after Ukrainian artists showed a season later. Mykhailo Ilko put the intention plainly in an interview: the gallery is the go-between for artist and viewer.

What it changed

The Ukrainian press at the opening called it the first contemporary art institution raised from scratch in the regional capital in the independence era, and the programme backed the billing up: several dozen exhibitions and around a hundred musical events in the first six years alone.

For a traveller that answered a fair question about Uzhhorod. The castle, the lime-lined embankment and the bronze miniatures are heritage of one kind or another; ILKO Gallery was where the region's art was being made and argued over now, and the local creative crowd treated it as a base.

Visiting

The address is vul. Koshytska 28, in a residential quarter roughly ten minutes on foot north of Ploshcha Koriatovycha, with parking beside the building and a café inside. Admission, when the doors were open, ran to 30 hryvnias, half that for students and pensioners, free for children under 12.

Now the caveat that governs any visit. The gallery's own site states that the art centre is temporarily not operating; its exhibition archive stops in 2019, and the last event listed is a charity concert on 16 September 2022. Check ilko.ua or the gallery's Facebook and Instagram before you walk over, and if something is on, rearrange your day for it.