Iwan Kulik

Challenge

Iwan Kulik has painted in oil since the early nineties — his first solo show was in the building of the Polish Sejm in 1991, and since then he has exhibited in Warsaw, Łódź, Sopot and Vienna. Several thousand canvases exist, most of them belonging to thematic cycles drawn from world literature: Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Orwell's Animal Farm, and a long-running series on Stańczyk, the Polish court jester. A catalogue that size cannot be presented as a chronological list — someone arrives interested in one subject, not in a career. And because originals are sold directly by the artist, without a gallery in between, the site has to carry the part a gallery would normally vouch for: that the painting is his.

What was built

The work is organised by cycle rather than by date, so a visitor enters through the theme that brought them and stays inside it. A "choose a painting" route runs from any canvas to a direct enquiry to the artist, with no dealer in the middle. A separate page explains authenticity — how a work is documented and confirmed. A blog carries the longer texts about the cycles and their sources. Light and dark themes, because painting reads very differently against white than against black, and the choice belongs to the viewer. Five languages: Ukrainian, English, Polish, German and Russian — the languages of the people who actually collect the work.

Technical decisions

Next.js with next-intl across five locales, deployed on Netlify. The whole site is images, so every canvas goes through Next's image pipeline and the pages are statically generated — a catalogue that is slow to page through is a catalogue nobody pages through. Language is picked explicitly in the navigation instead of being inferred from the browser: the buyers are scattered across countries, and where someone is says very little about which language they read. The theme toggle is applied before hydration, so neither theme flashes the other one first.