Anatoly Kryvolap

Anatoly Dmytrovych Kryvolap was born on 11 September 1946 in Yahotyn, in the Kyiv region of Ukraine. He studied at the Kyiv State Art Institute, Faculty of Painting, in the studio of Viktor Puzyrkov, graduating in 1976.

Kryvolap became known for a personal, non-figurative style built around a narrow, recurring set of subjects, the Ukrainian steppe, horses, and fields of color read as landscape, rendered with thick, worked surfaces and a deliberately restrained palette. He spent much of his career based in Kyiv before returning, around 2000, to the area of his birth, settling in the village of Zasupoyivka near Yahotyn, where he continues to live and paint.

His most sustained institutional recognition came in 2012, when he received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in Fine Arts for the cycle Ukrainian Motif, fifty paintings made between 2007 and 2010. He is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine and is reported, across sources that vary slightly on the exact year, to have become a corresponding member and then a full member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. In 2025, according to a Wikipedia summary citing a presidential decree, he was named a National Legend of Ukraine.

Kryvolap is consistently framed in Ukrainian art writing as the country's leading non-figurative painter and its most expensive living artist at auction, a status built on the string of Phillips and New York sales between 2011 and 2013 rather than on a conventional international gallery career. His state recognition, the 2012 Shevchenko National Prize and his standing in the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, reinforces that he is read domestically as a senior, canonical figure rather than an emerging one. No verifiable verbatim quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, and none is reproduced here.

Kryvolap's auction history is short but pointed. In 2011, his canvas Horse. Night sold at Phillips de Pury and Company in London for a price reported between roughly USD 121,000 and 124,400, at the time described in Ukrainian art press as a record for the artist. That figure was surpassed on 28 June 2013, when Horse. Evening, also referred to in some sources as Horse. Night, sold at Phillips in London for GBP 122,500, about USD 186,200, the highest price so far documented for any work by the artist. Subsequent Phillips and Sotheby's results cited on the artist's own site, including a GBP 68,500 sale in December 2014 and a GBP 51,650 sale in May 2012, sit below the 2013 peak. One Ukrainian outlet reports that nineteen Kryvolap paintings sold at auction between 2010 and 2018 for a combined total of about USD 800,000, consistent with a market that is high-profile but thin in volume.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Kryvolap, so authentication depends on documentation from the artist's own studio, the galleries that have shown his work, and the provenance trail at the auction houses, principally Phillips and Sotheby's, where his major results have occurred. His auction record is concentrated in a narrow 2011 to 2014 window, and sources do not agree on titles and exact currency conversions for his top two results, so collectors should treat any single quoted price with some caution and verify against the original sale catalogue. Current gallery representation is limited in the public record to a 2026 exhibition at Goldens Gallery (GS Art) in Kyiv, and broader or exclusive representation has not been independently confirmed.