"Festival in Pyrohiv" from the "Music of Kyiv" Series

Iryna Levytska was a Ukrainian painter, graphic artist, and monumental art creator.

In her work, the artist combined realistic and fantastical elements. Iryna Levytska’s paintings and other works were exhibited in Kyiv, Tbilisi, and Berlin.

The artist was born in 1927 in Kyiv. Her family had a creative background — her mother and grandmother were actresses. From an early age, she travelled with theatre companies and performed children's roles.

She lived through the war years under occupation; along with other displaced persons, she was taken to Austria, where she resumed her studies, which had been interrupted by the war. In Austria, she studied at the Higher School of Applied Arts in Vienna (1944–1946). In Ukraine, she pursued advanced professional training at the Lviv State Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts, where her mentors were Y. Bokshay, R. Silvestrov, and R. Selskyi.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the artist worked in the field of monumental art, creating over 200 monumental works in various techniques, including stained glass windows in numerous museums.

The artwork of Iryna Levytska in art exhibitions from 1955. Solo exhibitions were held in Kyiv (1981, 1983–84, 1989–90, 1994, 1998–2003, 2011), Tbilisi (1985), and Berlin (1991–92).

The artist passed away in 2012.

Her principal fields were monumental and easel painting (portrait, landscape, still life) and graphic art. Among Iryna Levytska’s original works are her stained glass pieces — Song of Verkhovyna (1960), Forest Song (1962), And Me in the Great Family (1963), Roses and Grapes (1967) — as well as monumental works at Kyiv Metro stations, and others.

The themes the artist developed for her monumental works she subsequently explored further in her painting and graphic art.

UFDA digitized six works by the artist from the collection of the Regional Communal Museum of Local History in Borshchiv, including: Artist's Day (1987), "M. Leontovych" (Vohnyk) from the "Music of Kyiv" Series (1987), "Festival in Pyrohiv" from the "Music of Kyiv" Series (1987), Carol Singing at the Samson Fountain (1987), and Competition at the Golden Gate (1987). These paintings are now available for viewing on the fund's website.

The main themes of the artist's work are Ukrainian history, the Baroque era, the world of theatre and music, and interpretations of the literary works of M. Gogol, Lesia Ukrainka, M. Rylsky, M. Bulgakov, and E. T. A. Hoffmann.

The breadth of the artist's wide-ranging interests is revealed in her series of watercolours, lithographs, and linocuts History of Kyivan Rus (1970–1990), as well as in painted canvases from various years.

Theatre remained one of the central forces of gravity around which the artist's creative pursuits developed; actors and the stage form an important dominant motif across numerous series. Equally, Kyiv in its various cultural dimensions permeated both her artistic and literary output. A particular theme in the artist's work is music: the feeling of it she renders in colour and personifies in portraits of composers from different centuries.

In Levytska's manner, realistic details and phantasmagoric, almost mystical elements are inventively combined. Her canvases frequently evoke theatrical scenes or dreams, where the boundary between reality and fiction is blurred. Her work represents a unique synthesis of theatre, literature, monumental art, and graphic art, and as such, many of her works may be attributed to Synthetism. Nevertheless, her output also contains elements of Romantic Expressionism and even Boichukism.