Artist recreates historical war painting using a crowd of Ukrainian soldiers

The Paris-born artist Emeric Lhuisset has recreated a well-known Nineteenth-century murals utilizing a troupe of Ukrainian troopers. Lhuisset advised The Artwork Newspaper that troopers of the 112th Territorial Defence Brigade re-enacted the Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880-1891) by the Ukrainian-born artist Ilya Repin, which exhibits Ukrainian Cossacks giving an insulting reply to an ultimatum from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1676.

Lhuisset says that he spent a yr on the undertaking, together with discovering the 40 troopers and arranging the line-up. “A copy [of the work] was given to me through the Maidan revolution [which took place in Ukraine in February 2014] and has sat as a magnet on the door of my fridge since 2014,” Lhuisset says in a press release. In an Instagram put up, Lhuisset exhibits how he put the undertaking collectively.

“This portray, so vital within the Ukrainian nationwide narrative, is within the assortment of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg,” he provides. “Tradition is a weapon in an enormous battlefield, let’s not attempt to neglect it.”

His model of the picture options Roman Hrybov, a Ukrainian border guard, who was serving on Snake Island positioned within the Black Sea when it got here beneath bombardment on the primary day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February final yr. Of that occasion, he says: “I instantly consider the response of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Ottoman Sultan ordering them to submit, immortalised by Ilya Repin.”

Earlier this yr curators on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York reclassified Ilya Repin as Ukrainian together with two different artists, Ivan Aivazovsky and Arkhyp Kuindzhi (all three have been beforehand labelled as Russians).

In 2020 Lhuisset was the fifteenth recipient of the British Journal of Images (BJP) Worldwide Images Award together with his mixed collection Theatre of Conflict and L’Autre Rive. Theatre of Conflict.

The photographs study the “theatrical picture of battle, staging actual Kurdish guerilla fighters in struggle settings to blur the boundaries between artwork and journalism”, says the BJP.

“Within the collection Lhuisset interrogates the dramatised picture of battle by staging genuine Kurdish guerilla teams in opposition to the backdrops of actual warzones.”