Irene Banach-Twerdochlib

I thank God for granting me the ability to express myself through art and show my love for my nation in it, conveying in my paintings the great suffering and the battle they fight on their native lands against the invader.

Irene Banach-Twerdochlib

Irene Banach-Twerdochlib was a Ukrainian graphic artist, painter, and master of folk woodblock printing.

Irene Banach (maiden name) was born on March 27, 1918, in the city of Vynnyky, Lviv region. Since childhood she was fond of art. In 1943, she graduated from the painting department of the Lviv National Academy of Arts. She worked as a teacher of drawing and painting at a secondary women’s professional school in Lviv. Even then she was a member of the Fine Artists Guild and was friends with the artist Olena Kulchytska. Together with her husband Petro (upon marriage, she took a double surname, adding “Twerdochlib” to her own), she was forced to emigrate due to the army’s rapid advance and the threat of the Bolshevik army capturing Lviv.

At first, the family moved to Hungary, then to Austria, and later settled in the German city of Augsburg, where her son Liubomyr was born in 1946. In Germany, the artist took part in collective exhibitions, illustrated children’s fairy tales, and designed several book editions. In 1949, Banach-Twerdochlib moved to the United States of America and settled in Rochester, where she gave birth to her daughter Orysia in 1950. Looking for a job, she first worked as a laboratory assistant in the anatomy department of the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she took courses in histology. At the same time, she studied painting and drawing at the same university, and, in particular, learned to paint portraits under the artist Stanley Gordon. Later, Irene Banach-Twerdochlib began working as a histology technician in the pathology department of Genesee Hospital, where she worked until 1979.

After retiring, she fully immersed herself in art. Irene Banach-Twerdochlib was a member of the Rochester Art Club and the Ukrainian Artists’ Association in the USA. In the 1980s, she actively exhibited her works in the United States and Canada. Her first solo exhibition was organized in 1976 in Rochester by the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America. In 1978, Irene exhibited at the Niagara Falls Art Gallery in Canada, founded by the Ukrainian couple of Olha and Mykola Kolankiwsky, where she also delivered a free course in woodblock printing. In 1980, she presented her works in Philadelphia at the Ukrainian Heritage Studies Center at Manor Junior College. In the 1990s, with the support of the National Commission for the Return of Cultural property under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, her enamels were transported to Ukraine and presented in Kyiv, Lviv, Vynnyky, Chernivtsi, and Kherson.

Irene Banach-Twerdochlib’s work covers a variety of painting, graphic, and decorative, and applied arts techniques. These are mainly ceramics, linocut, woodblock printing, batik, enamelwork, and egg decorating. The artist was especially fond of the sketches of woodblock printing on textiles. In her work, she repeatedly referred to the theme of Ukraine, reconsidering folk decorative art. Many of Banach-Twerdochlib’s works were devoted to socio-political topics: the Chornobyl disaster, the Holodomor, and Soviet repressions. In one of her most famous paintings, the artist depicted the ruins of the Dormition Cathedral, destroyed by the Soviet authorities in 1941.

In the 1990s, the artist began to work in abstract art. The collection of Museum of Ukrainian Diaspora includes enamels of the artist of this period: “Church of the Nativity of Virgin Mary in Vorokhta”, “Spring Blossom”, “Carolers”, “Competitions”, “Poppies in the Garden”.

Irene Banach-Twerdochlib passed away in 2013. She was buried at St. Andrew’s Ukrainian Cemetery in South Bound Brook, New Jersey, USA.