On September 15, 2023, on the eve of the City Day, the opening of the exhibition "Untold Stories" was held in the O.O.Osmerkin Art Memorial Museum, which presents the graphic works of the Mariupol artist Pavlo Ponomarenko, who temporarily lives in Lviv. This event became a symbolic unification of Ukrainian cities - heroic Mariupol, Lviv, which sheltered many internally displaced persons, and Kropyvnytskyi, where many Mariupol residents also live.
    Pavlo Ponomarenko was born on May 1, 1979 in the city of Mariupol, Donetsk region. He graduated from the Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics with a degree in "computer networks and systems", received a diploma in computer systems analysis (2005). He worked at the metallurgical plant "Azovstal" in Mariupol. Not having a professional art education, since 2011 he has been engaged in visual arts. Works in the genre of cubism, abstract art. In his works, he offers a vision of the surrounding world through the analysis of geometric shapes. Since 2017, he has been a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Participant of all-Ukrainian and international art exhibitions. He presented his first personal exhibition in Mariupol in 2021. Many of his creative works remained there and their further fate is unknown to him. With the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was forced to leave his hometown together with his wife and three children in mid-March 2022. Currently lives in Lviv. But the artist continues to paint. In July 2022, his personal exhibition "Reflections" was held in the "HotArtHall" gallery in Lviv as part of the "Ukraine after 24.02" project, at which he presented a series of graphic and pictorial works in the style of cubism, most of them in black and white tones - on contrasts, with a lot of sharp corners.
    The exposition of the exhibition consists of forty-one graphic works by Pavlo Ponomarenko. They were made with acrylic and gouache paints in the author's style in 2022-2023 in Lviv. Thoughts, emotions, feelings, worldview, philosophical reflections on human existence in the realities of war, longing for the sea and a peaceful life, hope and confidence that prudence and the creation of life will defeat the dark beast - all this is reflected by the artist in his favorite cubic forms with open local colors . Special attention is drawn to the artist's self-portraits - "Sad Self-Portrait" of 2022, "Self-Portrait" and "Selfie" of 2023. It is in them that the entire spectrum of metamorphoses of a creative personality is reproduced, from despair and deep pain to emotional and psychological recovery despite all the tragedies experienced and the loss of relatives, because art heals a wounded soul and instills in it faith in life.
    The exhibition was presented by the leading researcher of the museum, the well-known Kropyvnytskyi artist Olрa Krasnopolska, who suggested Pavlo Ponomarenko to arrange an exhibition in the museum of the artist Oleksandr Osmerkin, who in his work of the 1910s and 1920s was also fond of cubism and other trends in avant-garde art. During her speech, the artist noted that Pavlo Ponomarenko had already visited our city in September 2016 at the opening of the exhibition "Heirs of Kuindzhi" on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the birth of Mariupol native painter and teacher Arkhyp Kuindzhi from the private collection of Mariupol collector Oleksandr Chernov in the gallery "Yelysavethrad".
    And although the artist was prevented from coming to the opening of the exhibition for valid reasons, he sent a video greeting in which he talked about his work. The artists from Kropyvnytskyi who came to the opening also decided to creatively congratulate their colleague and drew their comments about the exhibition on whatman sheets, which are a component of the exhibition exposition, as well as wooden structures in the shape of a cube, symbolizing the city's high-rise buildings.