ARVM
ARVM are the initials of Kyiv monumental artists, architects, and sculptors Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko. This is how they usually signed their works, books, and letters.
With their works, artists have created the face of modern Kyiv. Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko breathed new meaning into the mosaic technique (Kyiv Central Bus Station and the Palace of Children and Youth Creativity, the former Palace of Pioneers). Working with the theme of human memory, they turned Kyiv's Baykovo Cemetery into a unique Park of Memory, part of which is the Wall of Memory, the largest work of Ukrainian monumental art.
Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko worked as architects, sculptors, were engaged in painting, graphics, book illustration, and created unique monotypes, woodcuts and linocuts, and tapestries.
From 1950 to 1956, Ada and Volodymyr studied at the Kyiv Art Institute (now the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture).
In 1954, when students were sent on internships, Ada expressed a desire to go to sea.
"But they go to the sea for fun..." the rector tried to object.
"I want to go to the Barents Sea," Ada answered.
"But it's dangerous! Who are you going there with?"
And Ada chose Melnichenko from among her classmates.
— Volodya, will you go to the sea with me?
"I'll go," he replied, having no idea what sea he was talking about.
They have not been separated since then.
Starting in 1954, Ada and Volodymyr traveled to the far north 7 times — in 1954, 1955–56, 1957–59, 1962–63, 1979, 1990, and 2000, spending a total of more than 7 years there.
The aesthetics of northern nature, the originality and courage of the local inhabitants, the Nenets people, made an incomparable impression on the young artists.
There, in the far north, a place where man confronts the elements, but at the same time, man and nature are one, the style of their further creativity was born and established. The artists absorbed the philosophy and culture of life of the northern peoples.
Works dedicated to the Nenets and their way of life have acquired, in addition to artistic value, also anthropological value, because from the 1950s to the present day, the Soviet Union, and then Russia, have almost completely destroyed this indigenous people, displacing them from their usual places of residence.
During these travels, Rybachuk and Melnichenko created thousands of paintings, graphic works, sculptures and stone panels, monotypes, linocuts and woodcuts.
In 1960–1961, in Kyiv, Ada and Volodymyr, at the invitation of Avraam Miletsky, implemented a project to design the interiors of the central bus station.
The artists created the design, colored sculptures, decorative and monumental works, and sketches of panels for this building.
Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko transformed the interiors of the bus station into a unique art monument. The scenes with the blue bus and the landscapes that open to the traveler's eye have become a pearl of Kyiv's monumental art.
In 2021, through the efforts of Volodymyr Melnichenko, the ARVM Foundation, the Gurin Brothers team of restorers, Kyivpasservis JSC, and more than 200 volunteers, the mosaic interiors were completely restored.
In 1963–1965, for the second time, at the invitation of Avraam Miletsky, Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko worked on the interior and exterior design of the Kyiv Palace of Children and Youth (then the Palace of Pioneers).
Ada and Volodymyr immediately rejected the "drum-pioneer theme" typical for the design of children's institutions of the Soviet era. Instead, they decided to design the palace interiors based on folk art motifs. The general concept of the future panels was formed under the influence of the works of folk artists Maria Prymachenko, Hanna Sobachko, Paraska Vlasenko and others.
According to Volodymyr Melnichenko, the plot of the "Sun, Stars and Constellations" fountain on the square in front of the Palace was inspired by Ada's memories of how, as a child, her grandmother would cook her jelly and draw on it with a spoon, saying:
"Here are the stars and constellations, and here is the Milky Way. And anyone who finds their star and goes to it along the Milky Way will never be able to turn back."
In 2018, the "Stars and Constellations" fountain was restored.
In 1967, the Kyiv authorities announced a competition to create a crematorium in the city. Avraam Miletsky approached Ada and Volodymyr with a proposal to take on this project. The artists refused this work for the same reason as all Kyiv workshops — not enough time had passed since World War II and the word “crematorium” was associated with the horrors of war and concentration camps. However, after thinking carefully and understanding the importance of the traditions of the Ukrainian people, that burial should take place with the observance of funeral rites, with the preservation of the meaning and philosophy of the folk attitude to the farewell ritual, Ada and Volodymyr agreed. And to thoroughly study folk traditions, they set off on a journey through the Carpathians.
From 1968 to 1974, work continued on the creation of a landscape park and the building of the Farewell Halls. According to the authors' plan, the entire memorial complex was to correspond to folk burial traditions - with the coffin being buried underground, with processions passing the hills, and with a temple (the role of which was to be played by the Farewell Halls) at the highest point.
“The more we worked on this complex,” Volodymyr Melnichenko recalled, “the more we realized that this was the most important project of our lives.”
Since 1974, work has been underway to design the retaining wall of the hill. Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko developed and implemented a unique engineering project. The outer surface of the retaining wall was made of curved metal poles, which formed three-dimensional figures, which were covered with a thin metal mesh, after which concrete was blown into the structure under pressure. This is how a huge wall 213 m long appeared, covered with high reliefs. The total area of the composition reaches 2000 sq.m.
Ada and Volodymyr worked on this piece for 7 years, 363 days a year, allowing themselves days off at Easter and Christmas. They bent about 95 tons of metal poles themselves, assisted by two welders who fixed the structure and a team of workers who came once a week to cover the figures with netting.
The high reliefs were intended to be colored. And the artificial pool located under the wall was supposed to reflect the figures, visually doubling the impression. The plots depicted on the Wall retold the history of humanity - from Adam and Eve through motherhood, labor, war, self-sacrifice and again to peaceful life and childhood. They were supposed to comfort a person who found himself here due to a severe loss, to show that death is a sad part of life.
Folk wisdom says: "There are three holidays in a person's life - birth, wedding, and death. And each of these holidays is prepared for us by others."
At the end of 1981, the Soviet authorities decided that the reliefs on the Wall of Memory did not meet the principles of socialist realism and should be destroyed. Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko were removed from the works. The reliefs were temporarily covered with plywood panels. It was decided how to destroy the work. Ada and Volodymyr's friends - Mykola Bazhan, Mykola Amosov, Oleg Antonov and many other representatives of the Kyiv creative and scientific intelligentsia - tried to stand up for the preservation of the work, but lost this duel with the Soviet machine.
The competition for projects to destroy high reliefs was won by the project of Avraam Miletsky, who, sensing danger, betrayed his long-time partners and signed the project to destroy the reliefs on the Wall of Remembrance.
During the spring of 1982, the reliefs were covered with a thick metal mesh (expanded sheet metal), and concrete was poured between the mesh and the reliefs.
2,000 square meters of a unique piece turned into a flat wall.
After the destruction of the reliefs of the Wall of Memory, Ada and Volodymyr found themselves isolated in their workshop. Even friends were afraid to communicate with the disgraced artists. Various reproaches rained down on Melnichenko and Rybachuk, including that they, painters by education, had taken on this work for nothing. In contrast to these words, Ada and Volodymyr decided to prove to themselves and the whole world that they were real sculptors. Thus was born a series of unique sculptures — ceramic, metal, combined — which are still the pearl of the exposition of the ARVM Museum-Workshop and the exhibitions in which they participate.
Most of these sculptures are dedicated to the North — the Nenets, friends of Ada and Vladimir from the days of their northern travels, and the fantastic aesthetics of their life in harmony and confrontation with the elements.
Ada Rybachuk passed away on September 21, 2010.
In 2018, 6 sq.m. of the central figure of the Wall was revealed as part of the Kyiv Art Week festival. In 2021, through the efforts of the ARVM Foundation, a 120 sq.m. fragment was revealed from under the concrete — the composition "Berehynia".
In 2012, Volodymyr Melnichenko took part in the design of the memorial complex "Bykivnyanski mohyly".
In 2020, Volodymyr Melnichenko, together with close friends — Eduard Timlin, Oleksandr Galinsky, and Ksenia Kravtsova — founded the Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko Cultural Heritage Preservation Foundation, the statutory task of which is to preserve and popularize the works of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
On April 19, 2023, Volodymyr Melnichenko passed away.
Today, the house at 10B Malopidvalna Street, where unique Ukrainian artists Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko lived and worked since 1971, houses the ARVM Museum-Workshop. As Ada and Volodymyr dreamed, their works are exhibited here, and cultural events and art workshops are held.
