Yuliia Smolii

Biography

Yulia Smoliy was born in 1957. Ukrainian art historian, museum worker and researcher of folk art. Candidate of Arts (2011), specialty 17.00.06 “Decorative and Applied Arts”.

She works as a researcher at the Department of Decorative and Applied Arts at the Rylsky Institute of Art History, Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her main research interests are Petrykivka painting, traditional house painting, and folk terminology of Ukrainian decorative art.

Contribution to Petrykivka Painting Research

Yulia Smolii is one of the leading contemporary scholars who systematically investigate the origins and early evolution of Petrykivka painting.

In 2011, she defended her PhD thesis on “Petrykivka House Painting of the Second Half of the Nineteenth - First Third of the Twentieth Century (Origins, Evolution, Artistic Features) ” at the Rylsky Institute of Folk Art of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a fundamental work that systematically reconstructs the early period of Petrykivka painting, when it existed as a house wall ornament, before the transition to paper and industrial production.

Key scientific works

• House painting of Petrykivka in the second half of the nineteenth century - the first third of the twentieth century (origins, evolution, artistic features): thesis abstract - Kyiv: M.T. Rylsky Institute of Fine Arts of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2011. 20 p.
• *House paintings of Petrykivka in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: local peculiarities and masters // Art History Studies - Kyiv: Rylsky Institute of Fine Arts of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
• *Evolution of ornamental motifs in Petrykivka painting: from utilitarian decor to easel art // Works of the Shevchenko Scientific Society.
• Traditional drawing on paper (“malyovka”) in the context of the development of artistic crafts of Dnipropetrovs’k region // Decorative and Applied Arts of Ukraine: Traditions and Modernity.
• Danylo Shcherbakivskyi’s role in the study and preservation of folk painting monuments of the Left Bank and Naddniprianshchyna // Folk Art and Ethnology. 2021 - No. 3.
• Features of the terminology of Ukrainian Easter egg painting of Katerynoslav region // Problems of Ukrainian terminological vocabulary in art history and ethnology: Collection of scientific papers. - Kyiv, 2002. - P. 101-109. The works of Yulia Smolii formed the modern academic understanding of early Petrykivka painting as a local phenomenon of Ukrainian house painting with its own masters, terms, and logic of evolution from applied decor to independent art.