The personal exhibition of graphic works of the famous Odessa artist, People's Artist of Ukraine Mykola Prokopenko "VIVAT LIFE" is dedicated to the Day of the Artist, which is celebrated in Ukraine on the second Sunday of October. The exhibition with such a symbolic name was organized at the initiative of the author, its exposition consists of 35 graphic works, executed in 2023 in mixed media. All of them are full of vital energy and encourage us to learn the meaning of life, because the main artistic image in them is a woman, who personifies life, because she gives birth and raises children, protects the home and radiates love. This is the basis of the artist's artistic philosophy.
    Prokopenko Mykola Mykolayovych was born on August 17, 1945 in the village of Lymanske, Reniisky district, Odessa region. Lives and works in Odessa. Graduated from the Odessa State Art School named after M.B. Hrekov (1971) and the Kyiv State Art Institute, now the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (1977).
    People's Artist of Ukraine (2015). Member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Member of the National Union of Theater Workers of Ukraine. Laureate of the Kirovograd Regional Prize in the Field of Fine Arts and Art History named after Oleksandr Osmerkin in the nomination "modern tendencies" (2018). Academician of the International Academy of Arts and Literature "Fatyan", Academician of the International Catherine Academy of Arts and Master of Painting of the Association "Freundschaft-Bruke" Gloria E.V. (Germany), Honorary Citizen of the city of Chornomorsk, Odessa region and the city of Ochakov, Mykolaiv region.
    For many years he worked as an artist-restorer at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art and the Odessa branch of the National Research Restoration Center of Ukraine. He was engaged in pedagogical activities, was a professor of the Department of Drawing, Painting, Composition and Architectural Graphics of the Odessa Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture. And now, despite his advanced age, he continues to actively work creatively and demonstrate his art at personal exhibitions, which his daughter Tetiana Bahar (Prokopenko) helps him organize.
    Painter, graphic artist, book graphic illustrator, artist-restorer of easel, tempera, oil and monumental painting, artist-decorator. Laureate, diploma winner and prize winner of international, all-Ukrainian and regional exhibitions, as well as international biennials and triennials of graphics and book illustration of printed and handwritten books. The artist's creative output includes hundreds of personal exhibitions. The works are kept in museum and gallery collections, national library funds and private collections in many countries of the world.
    In 2017, Mykola Prokopenko's solo exhibitions were presented in Kropyvnytskyi at the Yelysavetgrad Gallery and the Regional Art Museum, now the Art Museum. At the same time, the artist also visited the Oleksandr Osmerkin Art and Memorial Museum, and in the following 2018, with the assistance of the owner of the Gallery "Yelysavethrad", Mykola Tsukanov, he transferred to the museum collection more than fifty graphic miniatures from 1985-1998, which were exhibited in 2020 at the exhibition "Graphic Miniatures of Mykola Prokopenko" as part of the museum art project "Laureates of the Regional Prize in the Field of Fine Arts and Art History named after Oleksandr Osmerkin."
    During the opening of the exhibition, a thematic catalog of the exhibition was also presented, in the introductory article of which the famous art critic, Honored Artist of Ukraine Andrii Nadiezhdin, who successfully worked as a leading researcher at the museum for almost thirty years, characterizes the work of the People's Artist of Ukraine Mykola Prokopenko as follows: "The graphics and painting of Mykola Prokopenko are closely connected both thematically and in terms of plot, and in terms of formal approaches. In graphics, the artist remains a painter in the same way as in painting, a graphic artist, often using techniques and methods of form transfer characteristic of both arts. Line, contour, decorative plane and at the same time large colored masses, saturated with relief volumes, determine the means by which the artist creates the artistic space of compositions. A striking feature of Mykola Prokopenko's work is the monumentality and scale of spatial solutions, which is manifested in miniature graphic compositions as clearly as in large canvases…
    It is the individual worldview, a special view of everything that surrounds and what a person lives by, that determine the symbolic images of Mykola Prokopenko's work. His art cannot be called simply abstract. Having emerged from the powerful realistic school, having survived the period of existence within the strict boundaries of "social realism" and at the same time having discovered the era of post-impressionism and modernism, he created his own special creative approach, which unites the forms of non-figurative and realistic art, creating a peculiar artistic language of symbols, in which each conditional object appears in the form of a peculiar hieroglyph…
    The image of a woman occupies perhaps the most prominent place in his works, she is both spring, and earth, and sun, and sky, and the same pear, filled with the life-giving juices of nature, she glorifies and overthrows from the pedestal, she gives birth. In his artistic series, she is Life... In all the artist's compositions with female images, he divides the picture plane with a horizontal line, conditionally creating the space of earth and sky. His "conditional woman" is actually tied to the earth. She runs, jumps, tries to fly, and in most works she sits or lies, observing space, but she is part of the Earth in a planetary sense. She is Titian's Venus of Urbino and the iconographic Virgin of Adoration at the same time. Natural objects and phenomena - such as a lake, a flowering tree, the glow of a star, a bright flower - in his works belong to her by right, as synonyms of the womb, a designation of the starting point of the real birth of life, and the sky is the place that his heroines want to reach, which is why they often look up. It is precisely in this ambiguous way that a peculiar contradiction between life and death, embodied in the image of a woman, was viewed in the Baroque era. And Mykola Prokopenko himself resembles a person of that romantic time of spiritual and spiritual uplift, of bizarre experiments against the backdrop of the transience of events and the uncertainty of the future..."