Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery
Ukraine's largest art museum, shown mainly in the Potocki Palace while other displays stay shut.
Founded in 1907 as the Lviv City Art Gallery, the institution now holds more than sixty thousand works and is generally described as the largest art museum in Ukraine. It is named after Borys Voznytskyi, its director for half a century, who rescued large quantities of sacred art from closed churches during the Soviet period, including the Baroque sculpture of Johann Georg Pinsel. The gallery is not one building but a network of sites in Lviv and across the surrounding oblast, among them the castles of Olesko, Zolochiv, Zhovkva and Pidhirtsi.
The main displays in Lviv occupy two mansions: the Lozynski Palace on Stefanyka Street, built for the collector Wladyslaw Lozynski, and the French-Renaissance Potocki Palace of 1888 to 1890 on Kopernyka Street. Between them they cover European painting from the fourteenth century onwards, with Italian, Dutch, Flemish, French and Polish holdings, alongside Ukrainian art and decorative collections. Since 2022 parts of the collection have been secured and several displays closed, while a reduced exhibition programme continues in the Potocki Palace.
Highlights
- More than 60,000 works, the largest art collection in Ukraine
- European old masters shown in the Potocki Palace
- Named after Borys Voznytskyi, who saved Pinsel's Baroque sculpture
- Runs castles at Olesko, Zolochiv, Zhovkva and Pidhirtsi
