Born in L’viv, Western Ukraine, Maniichuk grew up in the Soviet years, earning his doctoral degree and teaching international law at Kyiv State University before immigrating to the United States and becom- ing an American citizen in the late 1980s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he returned to his native country as a legal consultant to the newly independent Ukrainian government on behalf of the World Bank. The country was undergoing tremendous political and economic change, and its art world was no exception. Realist and socialist realist paintings that Soviet-era government ministries and museums had commis- sioned and exhibited were out of favor — in danger of being forgotten, painted over or even destroyed. With the help of art experts, Maniichuk acquired paintings directly from leading painters, their heirs and regional
In November 2019, the Georgia Museum of Art received a gift of paintings from the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.
F IVE OF THESE SIX PAINTINGS are now on view in the museum’s permanent collection wing, where they will be up through September 26 (the sixth is undergoing conservation). They represent highlights of a collection of more than 100 paintings from Soviet-era Ukraine assembled by the late Jurii Maniichuk (1955 – 2009), while he was living and working in Kyiv, Ukraine, in the 1990s.
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