Nowadays, the masterpiece of painter Yuriy Nagulko is fairly well-known in the capital and beyond it. Actually, this can be said about the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian artists, but there is one aspect that marks Yuriy out of hundreds, or even thousands, of painters – he is different from others. His creation is so individual and original that it can be hardly inlaid into the ordinary art terminology; moreover, it is impossible to place it within the standard scale of artistic values.

Yuriy Nagulko was born 1954 in the town of Zdolbuniv in Ukraine. According to the Soviet classification, he is not a professional painter because he did not go to specialized art school, college or institute. He is a civil engineer and architect by his diploma but, by his essence, he is a philosopher, theorist, expert and inventor in painting, art technique and colour combinations, in search for chiaroscuro effects. He is a teacher and a student to himself, a judge and a critic to his own versatile oeuvre. His works sometimes meet all the accepted classic canons, but now and then his creative impulse leads him through the paths determined by no standards – everything depends upon the author and his passion in each specific work.

The fact that Yuriy did not get a special education within the Soviet system of art training (his student years fell upon the seventies of the last century) has apparently contributed to the mighty talent of a master in the introvert system of his personal schooling. It may be considered as an internal adverse to the “socialized” art system. Being not included into this system (no official exhibitions), the artist was not forced to paint pioneers, milkmaids, communist party leaders and others. Thus, he was estranged from the art society of that time with its laws of inner and outer values. He was not a participant of the Republican exhibitions, the Ministry of Culture and Management of the Artistic Fund did not purchase his works, Ukrainian-soviet art critics did not write about him and therefore, they did not edify him their with paternal words. Such course of life events must have fostered a powerful personality, an artist who differs from many others.

Yuriy Nagulko was an alumnus of his own university. I know him at present and want to place on record that it is not the same to pass exams at academies and to do it to oneself. The artist could only consider it done if he mastered the subject perfectly. He hammered at hundreds of books from all over the world that had to do with the academic training of a painter. He learned and summarized practically all books on anatomy, composite design, prospect, paint formulation and, certainly, Art History.

In disputes and fight with himself, trying to find truth just for himself, Yuriy Nagulko – given the amount of the studied material - took classes of at least several art institutes. Afterwards, everybody can have his own opinion on that. I, personally, consider Yuriy’s works the phenomenon.