Nikolai Bartossik

Nikolai Bartossik was a Ukrainian–American contemporary painter and monumental artist whose career spanned more than five decades and two continents. Trained at the Kyiv State Institute of Decorative and Applied Art and Design and the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, he came of age as part of a generation of Ukrainian artists who shaped public space at a monumental scale.

From 1976 to 1995 he worked at the Kyiv Monumental and Decorative Art Association, often in close collaboration with the artist Ernest Kotkov. Their joint sculptures and mosaics — in iron, concrete, brass and marble — still stand in Varash, Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv, where their composition for the Lybidska Metro Station, opened in 1984, remains in daily public view.

In 1995 he immigrated to New York, where he continued to paint until the end of his life. The studio work he made in America — primarily oil and acrylic on canvas — turned inward, away from the architectural and toward a more intimate, abstract vocabulary of color, gesture and form.

He was a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine (1993) and the United Scenic Artists of America (1998). His work has appeared in the encyclopaedic surveys Encyclopedia of Living Artists, New Art International, The Sculpture Reference, and the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine.

This site is maintained by his loving family as a living archive — a place to keep his work in view, and to share it with anyone who cares to look.