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Peter Magdenko stems from a long line of portraitists in Ukraine, and his was a prominent family in the region. One of his forbears, Basil Magdenko, was friends with the Russian writer Turgenev. It was the Russian Empress Catherine the Great who gave Andrey Magdenko 800 square hectares of land in Ukraine thereby establishing the region of Magdelinivka. In Magdelinivka, now in the Dnipropetrovsk region, a portion of the grand family home still stands. The Magdenko's also lived in Poltava where Peter Magdenko was born in 1922 and in Alushta Crimea and St. Petersburg Russia.
During the revolution of 1917, and then under Stalin in the 1930s, the Magdenko estate was expropriated and documents all but destroyed. In the Magdelinivka museum, however, an exhibit dedicated to the region’s founding families has been created, showing artifacts from the home and land of the Magdenkos. As of 2019, the Art Museum of Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro) houses art both owned by the Magdenkos and a portrait of one of the members of the family.
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Born shortly after the fall of Imperial Russia, Peter Magdenko attended the Dniepropetrovsk Art School as a gifted student in sculpture, under the tutelage of Professor Pavlo Pohrebnyak. In 1940 Magdenko’s sculpture Prokatnyk won first prize for sculpture. A promising career ahead, Magdenko was mentored by Vasil Boroday, who rose to prominence as one of the great sculptors of Soviet Era Ukraine.
The artists' studies were abruptly interrupted with the onset of the Second World War, when he was drafted and fought again the Nazis in Stalingrad. He resumed his work when the war ended at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Here he attended the class of Professor Adolf Schinnerer, an eminent German artist and one of the great print makers of the early 20th century. Together with Sergei Lytvynenko, a fellow student from Poltava, Magdenko established the Advanced Visual Art Studio, comprised of prominent artists of the time working in a variety of media.
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In Canada, Peter Magdenko spent four years at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) studying portraiture with the illustrious Canadian portraitist John Martin Alfsen (1902-1971). Alfsen had been a protégé and student of Lismer, Varley and MacDonald of the Canadian Group of Seven.
Magdenko cofounded the Shevchenko theatre company – first in Winnipeg, then in Toronto. Magdenko’s wife Vera (second photo from the top, seated figure) regularly took part in the theatre's productions.
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Noted as the first artist to use Siporex as a sculpting medium, he created a bust of Sir John A. Macdonald – the only existing bust of Canada's first Prime Minister. For many years the sculpture stood at the headquarters of Domtar in Montreal. His work has been exhibited at a number of Toronto galleries, including N&W Gallery in 1962 and We and the World Gallery located at 830 Yonge Street in 1966, in the US and Ukraine. Today, works by Magdenko are on display in public galleries and private homes across Canada, the United States and in the Middle East.
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The artist remained dedicated to his work throughout his life – painting, sculpting, teaching, writing on art theory and also working as an architectural draftsman. Already a master of classical portraiture and sculpture, he worked across traditions from socialist realism to his vibrant post-impressionism, the latter best seen in the landscape gallery on this website.
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Peter Magdenko died on May 3, 2002. The following March, a retrospective of his work was shown in Toronto. Several years later in 2004, two Ukrainian publications commemorated his work in Ukraine. In 2012 a radio interview was aired on his work and life in the region of Dniepropetrovsk, and a report on a visit to his ancestral home was aired on Ukrainian television. As of 2019, an exhibition of his work in Ukraine is being planned to share the life of this resourceful and talented renaissance man and introduce his work to a new generation of Ukrainians.
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