Research into the artistic legacy of Illia Shulga: a cultural-philosophical dimension

Abstract

The article offers a cultural and philosophical analysis of the artistic legacy of Illia Shulga, a Ukrainian artist and a repressed representative of the “Executed Renaissance”, whose work developed under the dramatic sociocultural transformations of the first third of the twentieth century. The study substantiates the relevance of a comprehensive interdisciplinary methodology that integrates the approaches of the philosophy of culture, art history, cultural studies, museology, and local history to reconstruct the artist’s partially lost and fragmented heritage.
It is demonstrated that Illia Shulga’s work transcends the boundaries of purely artistic practice and functions as an integral cultural text encoding the worldview, value-based, and identity-related foundations of Ukrainian modern culture. His paintings and graphic works represent national historical memory, reinterpret images of Ukrainian Cossack history, sacred architecture, everyday rural life, and the figure of Taras Shevchenko, while simultaneously visualising the experience of historical trauma caused by Soviet repressive policies.
Special attention is paid to the loss of a significant part of the artist’s oeuvre and to the role of museum, archival, and oral history sources in reconstructing his creative biography. The article argues that the reconstruction of Illia Shulga’s artistic legacy has not only historical and art-historical significance but also a broader cultural and philosophical dimension, as it contributes to the actualisation of “displaced” cultural knowledge and the reintegration of repressed artists into contemporary humanities discourse. In this context, Shulga’s art is interpreted as a medium of collective memory and a form of ethical resistance to totalitarian ideology.
In addition, the study emphasises the significance of Illia Shulga’s work in the context of memory politics and contemporary practices of interpreting cultural heritage. His art is interpreted as a form of worldview reflection and ethical resistance to ideological pressure, thereby allowing artistic practice to be viewed as a means of preserving national identity under a totalitarian regime. In this sense, Shulga’s legacy emerges as a medium of collective memory that connects individual artistic experience with broader cultural and mental processes of the “Executed Renaissance”, thereby reaffirming its relevance for contemporary humanities research.