Husar Handbook
Gerta Moray, Carol Podedworny, Stuart Reid, Dawn Owen & Meeka Walsh
Natalka Husar is a socially conscious artist passionately engaged in reflections on art and history. Her lifelong obsession with painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, has led her to create an overwhelming and immediately identifiable body of work centered on the conflict between the ideal of womanhood as silent and compliant and the self she sees as powerful and aggressive. Her complex images convey multiple narratives of the past and the present, of autobiography and social history, and of the lives of girls and women caught on the cusp of change. The view would be unrelenting were it not for a dark wit and an attention to texture and fabric reminiscent of Rembrandt and Vermeer. This sumptuously produced publication provides, as the title suggests, a unique visual and intellectual encounter with the work of a singular artist. Five essays and a text by the artist are accompanied by numerous colour plates and fold-outs. Published with the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in conjunction with the nationally touring exhibition, The Burden of Innocence. Born in New Jersey and a graduate of Rutgers, Husar lives and works in Toronto. Her work is represented in many institutions, notably The National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
McMaster Museum of Art (10/2010) 82 pp 56 ill (48 col) 9 x 9.5 in hardcover 978-0-9208108-7-3 $50.00 Can. $56.00 U.S. (40 euros)
Natalka Husar: Blond with Dark Roots
Shirley J. Madill, Ihor Holubizky & Robert Enright
Husar's critique of immigrant culture has been ongoing since the 1970s but the cultural shock of the post-Soviet era has provided grist for the mill, particularly with regard to the relocation/dislocation of girls and women. Far from ridiculing Old World behaviour, Husar's paintings intensify situations already exacerbated by dislocation and suffering. Ranging from a portrait gallery of fictitious post-Soviet immigrant girls to grand narrative tableaux, her work challenges accepted ideas of cultural identity. Husar's unsettling humour and talent shine in a second series of works - Library - where, in painting directly on the covers of romance novels, she cunningly pursues her exploration of the lives of girls and women. With two essays, an interview and numerous colour plates.
Art Gallery of Hamilton (2002) 80 pp 42 ill. (23 col.) 11x8 in. softcover 0919153704 $21.95 (Can./U.S.)