The Museum of Russian Art doesn't often show works by living artists, but for Leon Hushcha, it made an exception.
"Leon Hushcha: Balancing Act" is something of a retrospective, featuring a collection of the Minneapolis artist's paintings, drawings and sculpture from the 1960s through 2018, but it is by no means a complete picture of his career.
Incredibly prolific, Hushcha has stuck with the two styles he honed in the '60s and '70s: abstract work, in which he mixes glitter into swirls and splatters and carvings, and figurative paintings that explore the contours of bodies and faces with thick lines. Flipping back and forth between these two styles reflects his fascination with the conscious nature of figurative work and the more emotionally driven demands of abstraction.
There's a curiously intuitive feel to this art, giving it a folksy/outsider/DIY sensibility even though Hushcha is a well schooled artist, with a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Minnesota.
Hushcha, who grew up in Minnesota and is of Ukrainian descent, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Austria in 1949, among people uprooted by World War II. His family soon emigrated to the United States, sailing across the Atlantic in a journey reflected in the motifs of water and fish that come up in Hushcha's paintings. We see this in "Black Fish Hat" (1991), a portrait of a woman with a Picasso-esque cubist divided face, each side a different color, with a black fish atop her head.
This theme of memory comes up in a new work, "Anna," a watercolor, ink and pencil piece portraying the U.S. alien registration card that his mother received upon arriving at Ellis Island. It's a blown-up driver's license-style mug shot of his mom, holding up a placard with her name, but Hushcha has painted two doves and rolling water on the photo. The background ornamentation reflects his fascination with the shining gold and decorative borders he saw as a young boy going to St. Michael's and St. George's Ukrainian Orthodox Church in northeast Minneapolis.
Memories continue in "The Young Magician" (2006), a painting of a yellow-faced boy wearing a beige suit against a red background. We imagine that this is Leon himself, a portrait of the young artist in retrospect. Its eeriness seems to get to something deeper, with a style that echoes but does not replicate that of Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, whose gray, ghostly paintings of soldiers based on newspaper clippings recall the collective memory and trauma of war.
While growing up in Minnesota, Hushcha loved painting and running, but an accident in high school left him unable to run. So he painted. But he also loves glitter. The artist makes his work sparkle, often throwing a handful of glitter into the middle of an abstraction, as in the playful "Glitterama" (2013). Other abstract works bring up a specific sweetness, such as "Chocolate" (2015), a giant canvas covered in drips of brown, yellow, white, black and red. Abstract shapes and lines are carved into "Salmon" (2016), a shimmery acrylic and glitter painting with layers of gold, silver and beige.
