Assouline Naïve My Love: Ukrainian Folk Art of the 20th Century

Long before any academy trained a Ukrainian hand, doves, flowers, and family portraits were already appearing on the walls of village houses and the backs of painted furniture. Naïve My Love: Ukrainian Folk Art of the 20th Century gathers this overlooked chapter of art history into one volume: an encyclopedia of some forty self-taught painters and sculptors working across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each introduced through a short biography and paired with images of their wood painting, embroidery, carving, and decorative objects.

Maria Prymachenko, the movement's most celebrated name, appears alongside dozens of lesser-known artists whose work shaped the avant-garde of Malevich, Exter, Delaunay, and Larionov, and still echoes through contemporary design.

Ukrainian journalist Anna Lodygina, founder of Back to the Roots and former editor in chief of Elle Ukraine, writes the text; Kyiv-based curator Lidia Lykhach, founder of Rodovid Press, selected the works and shaped the book's framework, with creative direction from Mariia Gavryliuk and Natalia Kamenska of Gunia Project.

For collectors who have studied every book on the masters, this is a chance to meet the untrained hands instead, artists who painted from instinct rather than instruction. To open Naïve My Love is to discover a country's private visual memory, unschooled, unclaimed, and entirely its own. 

This project was initiated by Gogola.

Anna Lodygina is a Ukrainian journalist, researcher, and founder of Back to the Roots, a project featuring prominent figures of Ukrainian culture. In the past, she served as editor in chief of the online magazine Elle Ukraine, as well as working as a production editor for the Donbass. Realities project on Radio Liberty and as a journalist on Channel 5.

Lidia Lykhach is a Kyiv-based art publisher, curator, and editor specializing in Ukrainian naïve art and cultural history. A graduate of Kyiv National University (Shevchenko), she founded the influential journal Rodovid in 1991 and its publishing house, Rodovid Press, in 1993, through which she has produced more than forty albums, catalogues, and monographs in Ukrainian, English, and French, including major publications on Kazimir Malevich, Alexandra Exter, and the Ukrainian avant-garde. In 2003 she established Rodovid-Gallery in Kyiv. Her curatorial work includes the exhibitions Pure Art (Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, 2017) and The Beast of War: Naïve Art from Ukraine (Open Art Museum, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 2023). For Naïve My Love, she curated the selection of artists and works and shaped the book’s conceptual framework.