‘Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain’ at the Amy Kaslow Gallery

metroweekly.com:

Documenting Landscapes: Ukraine’s Vanishing Terrain serve to memorialize the country as the young Kyiv-based artist had always known it — peaceful and free, joyful and beautiful.

These are not depictions of today’s Ukraine — a scarred, desolate, bleak, war-torn land, ravaged after a full 15 months and counting of pillaging Russian invaders and prolonged fighting.“I don’t understand this war, I don’t understand why to kill people and destroy the destinies of an entire generation,” Leonets says in a release announcing the series and its run as the premiere exhibition at the new, expanded Amy Kaslow Gallery in downtown Bethesda.Leonets created his works at a time when paint, brushes, and linen were all in short supply in Ukraine.

It became a long and torturous process just to ship to the gallery the nine works currently on display — a journey drawn out by virtue of having to pass through a no-fly zone into Poland and on to Washington by way of Warsaw.

Accompanying the display are descriptions written by the artist of each work, all medium-sized oil on canvas paintings available at prices ranging from $3,500 to $6,400.A former international photojournalist, Kaslow embarked on her new career as a gallerist three years ago, opening her namesake gallery in an intimate, tucked-away space in Upper Northwest.