On the eve of the celebration of the Day of Kyiv, in May 2013, Kiev Fashion Park installed the city’s first sculpture on the water – “Rare Bird”. The work of Alexey Vladimirov is located in the middle of the Dnieper near the Paton Bridge, between the embankment Navodnitsky Park and Hydropark. This point on the city stretch of the river is known as the traditional turning point for cruise tourist boats.
So, for the first time in the history of the country and Ukrainian art, the sculpture was installed in the open space of a full-flowing river. Patrons of the creation and installation of the work were: Dmitry Oleinik, Ilya Yemets, Alexander Sokolovsky, Vadim Bashun, Valery Moshensky.
The work is dedicated to that famous unprecedented “rare bird” by Nikolai Gogol, which “… will fly to the middle of the Dnieper”. So the writer in the story “Terrible Revenge” from the cycle “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” described the beauty and power of a full-flowing river: “The Dnieper is wonderful in calm weather … A rare bird will fly to the middle of the Dnieper! Lush! it has no equal river in the world … ”
The “Rare Bird” was made by the famous Ukrainian sculptor Alexei Vladimirov from welded black metal rods and installed on the support of the once destroyed Navodnitsky bridge that remained in the middle of the Dnieper. The bird reaches a height of 3.5 meters, and its wingspan exceeds 5 meters. Thanks to the artistic decision of the author, the sculpture, weighing 500 kg, retained the lightness and dynamics of the image, and clear graphic lines highlight the work on the playing surface of the river.
Sculptures within the framework of the “Kiev Fashion Park” project can be seen in other interesting places in Kyiv:
– Landscape alley,
– Rusanovskaya embankment (Grandma with kravchuchka),
– Pechersky Landscape Park\Singing Field (Big Baking Tournament, The world through rose-colored glasses),
– Mariinsky Park (Director.Observer),
– Chreschaty Park (Love Story),
– Taras Shevchenko Park (grandmother classic).