A virtual solo exhibition of watercolors by Ivanna Solomennikova, a student of the Mykhailo Boychuk State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design, "At the Crossroads" is presented for the Artist's Day as part of the museum's youth art project "New Generation", which aims to identify bright, talented artists among student artistic youth personalities in the modern fine arts of Ukraine and provides for the arrangement of personal and collective exhibitions, as well as the publication of thematic booklets with art studies articles and reproductions of creative works.
    Ivanna Solomennikova was born on October 3, 2002 in an artistic family. She received her first art education at the Oleksandr Osmerkin art school in the city of Kropyvnytskyi (2017-2020). She is currently studying in the 3rd year of the Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design named after Mykhailo Boychuk at the Faculty of Decorative and Applied Arts, majoring in "art metal". An active participant in various exhibitions of fine and decorative arts. Multiple winner of Leonid Bondar's "Youth Palette" art competition for International Children's Day, organized by O. O. Osmerkin Memorial Art Museum with the support of the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Kropyvnytskyi City Council.
    This is how Ivanna Solomennikova herself writes about herself: "This is my second personal exhibition, the first was in my childhood, where small plastic was presented. The exhibition presents illustrations for stories that I came up with together with my friend Iryna Bohdan. Also, I continue to be fascinated by small plastics and making jewelry. The main task for me is to convey feelings and create artistic images in my works. Many artists write texts to bring their images to life. For example, Tove Janson. And for me, such a holistic creative process is natural. So I invent images of the characters, their lives and feelings, and try to convey that in the illustration. My favorite technique is watercolor. Thanks to it, you can create special textures, effects and dilutions. I like to use its graphic capabilities. The artistic task that I would like to achieve is the creation of a compositional and holistic space in the works and greater detailing of the environment in which the character is located. I'm trying to achieve my goals."
    The initiator of the current personal exhibition is the mother of the young artist, Larysa Kulinich, a senior lecturer at the Department of Art Education, Faculty of Pedagogy, Psychology and Arts of the Central Ukrainian State Pedagogical University named after Volodymyr Vinnichenko, a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and the National Union of Masters of Folk Art of Ukraine, who characterizes the work of her talented daughters: "We thought for a long time about how to name the exhibition, we decided on "At the Crossroads", because Ivanna is currently in a period of learning and finding her own way. She is interested in several directions of development in creativity, which sometimes intersect and sometimes diverge..."
    The exposition of the exhibition consists of nineteen graphic works by Ivanna Solomennikova, made in 2021-2022. The original composition of creative works is the author's prose and poetic texts. Many watercolors are based on the work of the English writer, a classic of world literature of the 20th century, one of the founders of the high fantasy of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Silmarillion. The pencil sketches for the book "The house in which..." by the modern Armenian writer in the genre of magical realism and artist Mariam Petrosyan are also interesting.
    "The works of Ivanna Solomennikova are a kind of romantic reflections on real life events, attempts to create their own conditional cosmos of personal artistic reality, in which the problems of daily existence disappear, turning into the territory of philosophical and emotional symbols, energetic movement of thought and heroes in search of the eternal ideal of the unity of the visible and the invisible," notes Andriy Nadezhdin, a leading researcher of the museum and Honored Artist of Ukraine, in the thematic booklet of the exhibition.