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Kowal, Roman

Image - Roman Kowal: Christ Enthroned, stained glass, 1960s, Saint Andrews Church, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Image - A church mosaic by Roman Kowal. Image - Roman Kowal: Saint Mary the Protectress, stained glasss window, 1966. Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Image - Roman Kowal

Kowal, Roman [Коваль, Роман; Koval’], b 12 October 1922 in Bashnia, Liubachiv county, Galicia, d 30 December 2004 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Artist. Kowal began his formal art studies in Lviv at the Institute of Folk Creativity (1942–3) under Mykhailo Mykhalevych and then continued in Munich under Serhii Lytvynenko and Edvard Kozak. He emigrated to Canada in 1948, working initially as a commercial artist. He began to receive church commissions in the latter 1950s, and is remembered best for his numerous innovative stained-glass window and mosaics, which incorporated abstract design into a neo-Byzantine form. He collaborated particularly closely with Winnipeg architect Victor Deneka. Kowal also enjoyed working with sculpture. The most notable of his works in that form are Red River Cart (1974), located in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park, and the monument to the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3 in Ukraine, outside Winnipeg’s City Hall. He also produced numerous paintings. The Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg sponsored a major retrospective of Kowal’s paintings and sculptures in 1988 and published a catalogue for that exhibit.

[This article was updated in 2009.]


Image - Roman Kowal: 1968 fresco in the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Russell, Manitoba. Image - Roman Kowal: 1968 fresco in the Church of the Mother of God, Mountain Road, Manitoba. Image - Roman Kowal: a monument commemorating the victims of the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine of 1932-1933.

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