ARVM museum - workshop
Malopidvalna St. 10B, Kyiv
The workshop on Malopidvalna Street in Kyiv, where the ARVM Museum is located today, is a unique object — the artists settled here in 1971, having built a house according to their own design. Here they created, from here they began their travels, and returned here. Here in 2010, Ada passed away, and in 2023, Volodymyr. Here everything remains as it was, here is a center of creativity and inspiration, here almost the entire huge collection of works by Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko is stored.
Currently, the ARVM Museum-Workshop is changing its exposition and is closed to the public.
At the same time, the ARVM Museum-Workshop hosts regular master classes in ceramics and mosaics, excursions, art lectures, film screenings, and many other interesting events.
Follow the schedule on our social media pages:
From January to June 2026
at the ARVM Museum-Workshop
an exhibition was on display
"Old Topchik and his sea"
The exhibition presents unique large-format paintings by Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko, stone sculptures, and woodcuts created during their travels to the Far North in the 1950s and 1960s.
The story of the North, which no longer exists, is told through the figure of an old man named Topchyk, a man whose dramatic fate prompted artists to make him a key character in many of their works.
The vast expanses of Northern Eurasia—the tundra, Arctic coast, and vast icy seas—were once home to peoples with deep traditions: the Nenets, Khanty, Mansi, Yakut, and Buryat. Their way of life, connected to the rhythms of nature, reindeer herding culture, shamanism, and strong family ties, shaped a unique cultural landscape that has endured for centuries.
In the mid-20th century, these territories became the subject of an intensive Soviet policy of development, including the exploitation of natural resources and nuclear weapons testing on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. This left deep scars on the land and in the memory of the people.
Against the backdrop of these historical processes, Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnichenko, finding themselves in the Northern tundra, were deeply impressed by the life of the Nenets — their attitude to nature, worldview, way of life, and traditions. In their travels, they met people, and among them — old Topchyk, whose fate became for them an artistic signal about the strength, vulnerability, and resilience of human destiny.
Topchyk appears in numerous paintings, graphics, and sculptures by the ARVM as a symbol of human dignity in extreme natural and historical conditions. Thanks to the creative legacy of Rybachuk and Melnychenko, the world today can imagine the lives of the peoples of the North, whose histories have been almost erased by imperial millstones.
The exhibition "Old Topchyk and Its Sea" presents a series of works created during the artists' journeys to the edge of the world. It is not only an artistic story, but also a conversation about memory, human resilience, and cultural identity in times of global change and conflict.
Today, when war turns entire Ukrainian cities and regions into ruins, the story of Topchyk and his North reminds us: artistic representation can preserve human memory and inspire the fight for one's country, one's history, and one's culture.
Part of the exhibition is Tanya Bakum's original spatial composition "Waves of the Tundra".
Exhibition curators:
Ksenia Kravtsova
Inga Levi
Oleksandr Galinskyi
Address
Malopidvalna Street, 10B, Kyiv
Opening hours
Wed - Sun
12:00 – 19:00
