Oleksandr Arkhypenko (Alexander Archipenko)

Oleksandr (Alexander) Arkhypenko was born in Kyiv in May 1887 into the family of Porfyriy Arkhypenko. In 1900–1902 he attended a Kyiv technical secondary school, and in 1902–1905 the Kyiv Art School. In November 1905 he was expelled for taking part in student protests during the revolution. The very next year, 1906, he and Oleksandr Bohomazov held his first exhibition in Kyiv, after which he left for Moscow.

From 1908 Arkhypenko lived in Paris, from 1921 in Berlin and from 1923 in the United States. He was the first to bring Cubism into sculpture (“Boxers”, “Gondolier”, 1914), replaced bulges with openings and concave forms, and invented “sculpto-painting”, a blend of relief and colour. His works include portraits of Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko made in the 1920s.

He died in New York in 1964. His works are in the collection of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, and a street in Kyiv’s Obolon district bears his name.