Vira Pavlenko

Biography

Vira Pavlenko was born on 17 July 1912 in Katerynoslav (now Dnipro). She spent her teenage years in Petrykivka, where she grew up in the family of the artist Paraska Pavlenko. She learned art from her mother - from an early age she painted red flowers on the stove’s “stitching” while her mother drew out the leaves and her younger sister Halia “plugged” the blue grapes.

in 1936, she was invited to the Kyiv Experimental Art Workshops, where, together with her sister Hanna and other Petrykivka artists, she first began to use Petrykivka painting on porcelain. Since 1944, she worked at the Kyiv Experimental Ceramic and Art Factory (KECAF), where she developed this direction together with her sister and Vira Klymenko-Zhukova. In 1947, together with other Petrykivka masters, she introduced underglaze painting on a black background at the Shevchenko Souvenir Factory in Kyiv, a method that later became characteristic of all Soviet Petrykivka painting.

Honored Master of Folk Art of the Ukrainian SSR (1960). Member of the Union of Artists of Ukraine. She died on June 2, 1991 in Kyiv.

Artistic Practice

Vira Pavlenko is one of the pioneers of Petrykivka painting on porcelain. She painted vases, wall plates and dishes, table and tea sets, and souvenirs. At the same time, she created decorative panels on paper, works of decorative graphics, artistic postcards, book design, and fretwork paintings.

Among her well-known works are the vases “Jubilee” (1967) and “Wedding” (1972), graphic works “Ukrainian Girls”, “Birds on a Branch”, “Viburnum”.

Recognition

Honored Master of Folk Art of the Ukrainian SSR (1960). Her works are permanently exhibited in the collection of the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art in Kyiv.