New book explores Ukrainian naive art and its influence on Gunia design

A new coffee table book, 'Naive My Love,' created by Assouline with Ukraine's Gunia Project, celebrates Ukrainian naive and folk art. It profiles about 40 self-taught painters and sculptors and traces how their personal works defied Soviet socialist realism. The book includes artists such as Maria Prymachenko, known for her vivid colors and fantastical beasts.

The volume pairs images with essays on the roots of these traditions and brief lives of roughly forty untrained makers. It spans painting, embroidery, carving, and decorative work, distinguishing folk art’s inherited communal patterns from naive art’s individual, self-directed vision.

Many pieces were made outside official channels, offering a personal counterpoint to Soviet socialist realism. Prymachenko’s biography includes childhood polio, the Holodomor, wartime loss, single motherhood, and Chornobyl; Raiko began wall painting at sixty-nine, and her Oleshky home later became a heritage site before being nearly destroyed by 2023 flooding.