The dissertation is a comprehensive study of the national symposium practice at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in its correlation with the evolution of world plastic art. Taking into account the active dynamics of Ukrainian symposia, the objective of the work is to establish the role of sculptural symposia in the process of forming the main trends in the evolution of contemporary Ukrainian sculpture, namely conceptual design objects and works focused on the artistic and figurative episteme; to determine the place and significance of the Ukrainian symposium movement in the context of world sculptural practice, particularly the international symposium movement, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
This topic requires further study in the Ukrainian and foreign art historical discourse, in particular in the context of the negative consequences of the commodification of cultural products under the influence of the neoliberal economy. The attribution and systematisation of the representative object base of the study revealed the fact of the complete loss or damage of some plein air sculptures. Their condition in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine remains unclear. It is noted that the symposium movement in Ukraine was facilitated by new urban planning and social conditions, as well as the gradual evolution and entry of plastic into public space. The founder of the Ukrainian symposium movement (1986) was the Kyiv sculptor Y. Synkevych.
It has been found that the first (1986-1990s) stage of the national symposium movement was characterised by the historicism of the sculptors' artistic consciousness, caused by their search for a "Ukrainian style" and the intensification of the process of national self-identification in Ukrainian society. Certain artists of the 1960s and 1970s updated their plastic vocabulary by working in solid materials without intermediate models and by referring to the modernist tradition. On the other hand, some representatives of the younger generation, whose formation took place in the more democratic period of the second half of the 1980s, perceived the actualisation of national artistic codes in the postmodernist plane. The second stage (2000s) is characterised by a greater conceptualisation of symposium practice and its subordination to the strategies of public art and the art market. These narratives of globalisation were opposed by the concepts of individual symposia focused on ethno-national discourse and transcendental aesthetics.
It is noted that the evolution of the international symposium movement reflects the transition from the autonomous artepistem of modernism to the conceptual and spatial perception of sculpture within the "expanded field" of postmodernism. Among the main global symposium trends are the unification and conceptualisation of the artistic language, designing and general commercialisation. It is proved that today the international symposium movement is not at the forefront of formal and stylistic innovations in the world sculptural practice. Nevertheless, its institutionalisation, dynamic spread around the world, as well as the promotion of sustainable urban development, proves the cultural and artistic relevance of the symposium phenomenon. Despite its specificity, the development of the Ukrainian plein air movement is in line with current processes in the international symposium movement and world sculptural practice.
A comparative analysis of the paradigms of national symposia has demonstrated the prospects of private and hybrid symposium models, which look at current trends in the global cultural industry and give priority to contemporary art projects. However, the basis of the Ukrainian symposium movement, the municipal model, remains in demand. The national symposium practice can be defined as art in public space / public places, which has a significant socio-cultural potential and is able to contribute to the creation of safe and inclusive cities within the sustainable urbanism movement, which is crucial in the context of Ukraine's post-war recovery.
A representative sample of landscape works by Ukrainian artists who are now active participants in the international symposium movement is introduced into scientific use. Their work is successfully integrated into the world art space, and their foreign plein air experience stimulates the renewal of their plastic language.
Ukrainian symposia reflect four current stylistic strategies of national sculpture: contemporary abstract-conceptual reduction; Hellenistic-oriented sculpture with the primacy of transcendental aesthetics and Ukrainian cordocentrism; kitsch and naturalistic hapticism. However, they no longer play the same role in the modernisation of sculptors' plastic thinking as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.
