Born in 1954 in the town of Kosiv, Ivano-Frankivsk region.
Graduated from the KOSIV special College of National Crafts, Department of Metal Decorative Processing /1975/ and Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts, the Department of the Interior and Furniture Design /1982/.
Works as a painter.
Participant in regional, republic and international exhibitions. The works are represented in the private collections in Ukraine, Poland, France, Germany, Austria, Israel, the USA, Canada.

It is impossible to outline the thematic repertoir of Mykola Hrymalyuk creative work singularly. His pictures-meditations appear as though in the process of material incarnation of thought, its free andunforessen development. The artist creates his own vision of the surrounding world by the categories of the artistic Universum. His canvases represent the synthesis of colour and light, touches and strokes of paint and line, substance and spirit, national plastic and imaginative archaetype and reality filled with apocalyptic moods.
The number of pictures which can be united under the single heading "Guzuly" represent quite the peculiar branch of Mykola Hrymalyuk creativity. Abstracting oneself from the fact what subjects, compositions,images the artist depicts on his canvases, he always returns to the theme of his native Carpathian land. It isthe theme that is by itself the healthy and creative source which nourishes, excites and inspires him. The pictures "The Silk Flower", "The Bride", "On the Stilts" are filled with the utmost secrecy of existencial mystery of human being, the phylosophy of the author"s worldvision, who creates the deepest essentialityof life by means of the painting form structure, energy, strength and spiritual expressiveness of colour. The painter penetrates deep into the mysterious inner world of the human being, strives to transmit the real and subconscious ties of the human being with the space, eternity, strives to reproduce the range of the feelings, thoughts, intentions and sufferings by a peculiar rhythm and dynamics of paint"s touches, particular strokes of the brush, comparison of colours which are always in the process of continuous stirring and changes, as if they were "a living substance".

With helpless tenderness, strongth and sweetness are filled the pictures of this same series "My Grandfather", "Autumn", "The First Eucharist". The softened changes of tints, on which the deep goldness and orange glisten like sparkling embers, one associates with the melancholic and sorrowful melody of the grandfather"s violin. On the contrary, the colours of the picturesque canvases "Dovbush" and "The Tumble-Weed" ring with the mighty, wild and free voice of trembita, personifying the stormy elements of the Carpathian nature and the mystery of the old times legend.

The portraits, the whole gallery of images make quite peculiar group of painting. They constitute the portraits beginning from the reproducing of the close and intimate for the artist people - "The Boy", "Motherhood", then the creation of the monumental portraits of the outstanding persons - "Pavlina Tsvilyk", "Mychailo Grushevsky", to composite associatively-phsycological, phylosophical images like Leonardo, Prophet ets. There canvases bear the peculiar vision of the world by the artist-creator, his phylosophical meditations as to the role of the personality, phenomenon, some event in the continuons and infinite process which is called life.

And the most important layer in the creative process of Mykola Hrymalyuk is the series of pictures under the conventional heading "The Phylosophy of Existence". The tense concentration of the artist"s thought is felt in these canvases; this very concentration of thought is the leading and prior in defining the exceptionally wide scope of associative influence of these painting. The imaginative visions of the painter lose the time parameters and the narrow base of reality. Through the abstract, dynamic, strained, multi-coloured backround which is the conglomeration of lines and touches, strokes of brush and sparkles, the statures of people, worked into the canvass by the mechanism of the picture"s intrigue, appear before the spectator, developing the whole panorama of associations and phylosophical reflexion /"The Prayer",
"Inside the Square"/Selfportrait/, "Temptation", "Emigration", "The Destroyed Belief"/. At this new stage of creativity, the artist, activizing the expressive possibilities of the line, form, facture, the language of signs and symbols, behind which one feels the deepest understanding of the world, concentrates all his attention on the complication and comparison of colour, its energetic force. The colour in Mykola Hrymalyuk pictures represents the dramatic vision of the world and existence.

text by Rostyslava Hrymaliuk

Internet Gallery of Ukrainian Art, UARNet
contact to: Tetiana Chornovus