Yastreb, Liudmyla

Yastreb, Liudmyla [Ястреб, Людмила; Jastreb, Ljudmyla], b 10 April 1945 in Krasnikovka, Saratov oblast, Russia, d 8 August 1980 in Odesa. Painter. She graduated from the Odesa Art School (1964) and worked for the Art Fund. She took part in some of the exhibitions held in private apartments in Odesa in the 1970s and in the 1975 and 1976 exhibitions of Ukrainian nonconformist artists held in a private apartment in Moscow (see Nonconformist art). Yastreb organized a solo exhibition of 100 of her paintings in her own studio in 1976. Women, her favorite subject, dominated her work. Her early paintings, such as Women in Red, Blue, and Yellow (1975), tended to be figurative but were not realistic. Later her work became more and more abstract, as in Large Bathers (1979). Some of her best canvases were painted near the end of her brief life. They were large overall compositions, full of light and painted with spontaneous, energetic brush strokes in the manner of American abstract expressionism (eg, Bright Composition, 1978). A posthumous exhibition of her works was organized in 1983. The studio of Yastreb and her husband, Viktor Maryniuk, was a gathering place for Ukrainian artists in Odesa.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]