While the participation in the first Soviet-American exhibition Soviart Oleh Tistol get acquented with the artist Dmitry Kantorov, who invites him to Moscow's squat Furmanny Lane.

At the end of 1988 Tistol and Reunov in cooperation with the curator Olga Sviblova start to exhibit their works in Glasgow, Reykjavík, Helsinki.

Combining in his works the national and soviet symbols, myths and utopias he discovered for himself the notion of simulacrum — a copy with no original.

Tistol was primarily interested in its formal aesthetic aspects - stencil plates, color back-ups, smoothly painted surfaces.

Oleh Tistol's early works, the large-scale paintings (“Zinovy Bogdan Khmelnitsky” (1988), “Reunification” (1988), “The Farewell of Slavyanka” (1989), “Exercise with Maces” (1989)) demonstrate the main features of the Ukrainian “new wave” — free play with symbols, bright expressive colors, and special “exaggeration” of artistic devices.

Domestic mythologicality of the world outlooks, the retrospection of the orientations and the ambiguity of the stereotypes have been represented as a cultural drama, as its traditional features.

[2] The theme of “stereotypes” was continued by Oleh Tistol in his painting series “National Geography” (1998–2004) where he combined “the local” and “the foreign”, the authentic and the borrowed, the ethnic and the global problematic.

[5] The project contains the pictorial paintings and the cycles of prints, where the pages of school notebooks, quick notes, casual sketches, supermarket's receipts, bills from the hotels and laundries, letters, the invitations on the passed exhibitions and the air-plane tickets are used as a background.