NEW YORK (AP) – The negative is the positive – and vice-versa.

With that edgy attitude, sculptor Alexander Archipenko molded human figures, literally carving holes into the bronze, wood, plexiglass or whatever other material struck his fancy. He produced a concave breast to go with a full one, a leg with an airy vacuum near a fleshy one and other forms that cajole the spectator into participating; the eye begs the mind to fill in what’s missing.

The words of the artist, who died in 1964, appear on the wall of an exhibit of his works at the new home of the Ukrainian Museum in Manhattan:

“It is not exactly the presence of a thing but rather the absence of it that becomes the cause and impulse for creative motivation.”

The institution was first created in 1976 “to show that Ukraine, which was under the Soviet Union so long, has its own language and culture,” said museum director Maria Shust.

Later this month, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is expected to visit the museum, where all the employees are fluent in both English and Ukrainian.

The 25,000-square-foot, $11 million brick and glass edifice opened last April in the East Village. It’s an avant-garde incarnation of the 3,000-square-foot space a few blocks uptown that housed the original museum, which was too small to properly display a collection including photos and documentary films.

The museum also aims to keep alive – and teach – Ukrainian traditions like elaborate Easter egg painting called “pysanky,” folk embroidery and beadwork.

It’s fitting that the retrospective on the Ukrainian-born Archipenko is in New York, where he moved in the 1920s from Paris and became a U.S. citizen.

Archipenko’s art is sensuous, elegant and provocative.

Born in 19th century Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, he had jumped into the 20th century modernism with glee, inspired by Picasso and other Cubists working in Paris, then creating his own modern idiom in New York.

The artist’s wife, Frances Archipenko Gray, oversees a foundation in his name based in upstate Woodstock, where they had a home, studio and art school. He also purchased a stone quarry in nearby Bearsville.

But stone was only one of many mediums Archipenko used.

Decades before the term multimedia was coined, he was “a revolutionary” in exploring multiple media of form, color, materials and movement, said Shust.

“His father was an engineer and his grandfather an iconographer,” she said. “That produced a combination of sculpture and color. You could say he was the father of fusion in art, always looking for new things, new ideas.”

Using a chemical formula that’s still kept secret by the Queens foundary that poured his sculptures, he applied it to bronze, turning its surface into a deep blue-green. Other works contain wires, cardboard and painted wood or terra cotta, and some “sculpted paintings” pop out from a round base.

Sculpture is static, but Archipenko somehow created a dynamic vibration in “Dancers” of 1913. Conversely, a 1961 figure titled “Dignity” feels utterly still.

He also pioneered “kinetic” art – a circus juggler made of wood, glass and sheet metal whose arm really does move. “He linked the world of entertainment and art,” said Shust.

Open to the public through Sept. 19, the show features some works on loan from Manhattan’s Guggenheim, Whitney and Metropolitan museums, the Museum of Modern Art, and the private collection of Archipenko’s wife.

Jaroslaw Leshko, an art professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., curated the exhibit, which was designed by Yoshiko Sato and Michael Morris of the innovative Morris Sato Studio in Soho.

A day-long symposium on the artist is to be held at the nearby Cooper Union on Sept. 17.

After it closes in New York, the Archipenko show is to travel to Smith College and the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The museum will then open an exhibit on Ukrainian folk art.

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