Oleksandra Ekster (Alexandra Exter)

Oleksandra (Alexandra) Ekster, née Hryhorovych, was born in 1882 in Białystok but spent her childhood and youth in Kyiv. She graduated from the St Olga Gymnasium and in 1901–1903 and 1906 studied at the Kyiv Art School alongside Oleksandr Bohomazov and Oleksandr Arkhypenko. After marrying the lawyer Mykola Ekster, she set up a studio in the attic of a house on Fundukleivska Street (now Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street), opposite the Opera House. Anna Akhmatova, Ilya Ehrenburg, David Burliuk and Benedikt Livshits were among its visitors.

Ekster divided her time between Kyiv and Paris, befriended Picasso and Apollinaire and brought the latest ideas of Cubism and Futurism back to Kyiv. In 1908 she showed work at the avant-garde exhibition “Zveno” (The Link) with the Burliuk brothers, and in 1914 she and Bohomazov organised “Kiltse” (The Ring), a show of Kyiv’s left-wing artists. In 1918–1919 she ran her own studio of decorative art in Kyiv, where Anatol Petrytsky, Vadym Meller and other future stars of stage design trained. Her painting “Fundukleivska Street in Kyiv” (1914) is one of the emblems of the Kyiv avant-garde.

In 1924 Ekster emigrated to France, taught at Fernand Léger’s Académie Moderne and died near Paris in 1949. In 2023 Kyiv named a street on the Left Bank (formerly Maryny Tsvietaievoi Street) and a light-rail station after her.