Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now

Through April 7. The Ukrainian Museum, 222 East Sixth Street, Manhattan; 212-228-0110, theukrainianmuseum.org.

If you know the name Maria Prymachenko, it might be because in February 2022, Russian forces attacked a Ukrainian museum that housed 14 of her paintings. People saved her art from the blaze, and Prymachenko — a cultural icon in Ukraine — became an international symbol of a nation’s resilience.

In a way, this is fitting, since her exuberant art is allegorical and filled with allusions to folk tales. But it has also perhaps flattened her. If before she “was regarded as a benign, cheery folk artist,” as one critic put it, lately she’s been seen as an antiwar beacon of hope.

The show “Maria Prymachenko: Glory to Ukraine” suggests a more complex reality. The largest exhibition of her work outside of Europe, it features over 100 paintings, embroideries, ceramics and wooden plates. Prymachenko mostly painted flora and fauna, real and imagined, from proud peacocks to flowers with eyes and multiheaded beasts. Her style is cartoonish; her works patterned and repetitive, almost psychedelic.

Prymachenko, who was born in 1909 in Bolotnya, a village near Kyiv, survived a lot: polio, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, the deaths of her husband and brother in World War II, and Russification. You wouldn’t immediately know this from her art, which vibrates with playful energy. But there’s mania, too, in the surrealism of her images and the way her landscapes’ almost eruptive states of bloom. More pointed works, such as “War Is Horrible” (1968) — which shows a beast filled with the heads of other animals — seem like the flip side to national paeans like “A Ukrainian Palianytsia” (1984), which depicts a couple holding up the titular loaf of bread. Prymachenko died in her hometown in 1997.

“Glory” is an apt word here — not in the patriotic sense of the show’s title, but in tribute to Prymachenko, whose talents demonstrate that she was weirder and more worldly than she gets credit for.

Khadim Ali

Through April 6. Aicon, 35 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; 212-725-6092, aicon.art.