Volodymyr Melnychenko and Ada Rybachuk

Volodymyr Melnychenko (born in 1932) is a painter, sculptor, architect, a Merited Painter of Ukraine, and a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine.

Volodymyr Melnychenko was born in Kyiv in 1932. He graduated from Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Art School (1950) and Kyiv State Art Institute (1957). For a long time, he was working in a creative tandem with his wife Ada Rybachuk.

Ada Rybachuk (1931–2010) was an artist, graphic painter, a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and a honored member of the Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine.

Ada Rybachuk was born in Kyiv in 1931. In 1957, she graduated from Kyiv State Art Institute. In the 1960s, she worked in the spheres of monumental decorative art, painting, and graphics. She also participated in artistic trips around Ukraine, Armenia, and Russia (to Kamchatka and the shores of the White, Barents, and Kara Seas). In 1979,  a permanent exhibition of the Northern works of Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko was opened in Nenets Local Lore Museum at Naryan-Mar. The artist died in Kyiv in 2010.

The most well-known works of Volodymyr Melnychenko and Ada Rybachuk are: 

  • the interiors of Kyiv Bus Station;  
  • the interiors and the mosaic pool Sun, Stars and Constellations for Kyiv Pioneers and Pupils’ Palace (today’s Kyiv Palace of Children and Youth);
  • the Memory Park burial complex on Baikova Mountain. Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko authored the concept of the park, created farewell halls of Kyiv crematorium and the Wall of Memory, which was destroyed (covered in concrete) by the order of Soviet authorities in 1982, after thirteen years of the artists’ work; 
  • the project When the World Is Being Ruined dedicated to the memory of Babyn Yar victims.

The art collection of the Center includes 10 Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Melnychenko’s auto lithographies: five works from the Memory cycle (1965–1982) devoted to Babyn Yar tragedy, three works from The Great Rostov series (1968) as well as the works Jokers (1983), May of 1945 (1985), and GULAG (1968).