A new training week of the Summer School of Restoration has started today, dedicated to the polychrome murals of the Art Nouveau period. Over the course of six days, participants from different cities of Ukraine will work with original wall paintings at the site on 19 Nechuya-Levytskoho Street: studying paint layers, mastering techniques of cleaning, consolidation, and retouching, and learning to work with color and materials.
The program also includes emergency stabilization work with plaster: reinforcing reed mats, stitching cracks, and filling in missing fragments.
The course is led by second-category restorer-artist Iryna Hirna together with the team from the “Garda” workshop — specialists with many years of experience, who help participants not only gain new knowledge but also connect directly with the unique heritage of the Art Nouveau era.
The first day — a day of introductions.
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Introduction to Iryna Hirna, who shared principles of restoration and spoke about plasterwork and its fundamentals;
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Meeting the restoration team;
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Getting to know each other as participants from different cities;
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And most importantly — the first look at the actual site that will be the focus of work throughout the week.
“You will be dirty, tired, but happy,” said Iryna. And with this promise, we began a new adventure into the world of Art Nouveau wall paintings.
The Summer School in Lviv became possible thanks to the implementation of the international project “Art Nouveau as a New Eurotopia. How the Past Can Be a Bridge to a Sustainable Future”, funded by the Creative Europe program in cooperation with partners from the Réseau Art Nouveau Network (RANN). The project aims to research and promote Art Nouveau heritage, to reinterpret it through the lens of sustainable development, and to create new educational and cultural opportunities for young professionals in different European countries, including Ukraine.
