Restorers from Russia will help restore the stock of a burnt gallery in Sukhum

SUKHUM, January 26. Russian restorers from leading museums and specialized institutions will work on rotation in Abkhazia, where a fire destroyed almost the entire collection of the state art gallery, said Natalya Chechel, deputy director of the museums department of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
She heads a delegation of representatives of the State Research Institute of Restoration (GosNIIR), the All-Russian Art Scientific and Restoration Center named after I.E. Grabar, Tretyakov Gallery and Russian Museum. Experts arrived in Sukhum to assess the damage from the fire.
“Some of the restorers will come here on a rotational basis and work here,” Chechel said. At the same time, she added, some of the work will have to be exported to Russia for restoration, since there is no equipment for this in Abkhazia.

According to her, paintings that cannot be restored in the republic are already being prepared for transportation — in particular, they are treated with special glue so that the paint does not crumble. “In the evening, we cooked glue right in the hotel so that this morning we could seal these paintings. After the procedure, they can already be transported,” Chechel said.

She noted that this work is also of scientific interest: for example, on the canvases damaged in Sukhum there are previously unstudied cases of paint foaming due to high temperatures; a search is underway for suitable materials and ways to correct this defect. “We will be able to improve existing methods using modern materials and more advanced scientific capabilities. Here we can try them,” said Maria Churakova, head of the scientific direction of GosNIIR.
The director of the art gallery, Suram Sakania, decides which works will be restored first. “First of all, we will restore paintings on an Abkhaz theme — portraits of people, landscapes where Abkhaz open spaces are visible, city views and the like,” he said.
The fire on the night of January 21 destroyed almost the entire stock of the Abkhaz State Art Gallery — more than 3.5 thousand paintings burned, about 200 survived. The gallery was located on the second floor of a two-story pre-revolutionary building in the center of Sukhum, in close proximity to the Abkhaz State Dramatic Theater theater Since 1963, the gallery, created on the basis of a private collection, has collected works by famous masters in the USSR. The most valuable exhibits there were the works of Alexander Shervashidze-Chachba, the first Abkhaz professional artist, set designer of Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons”. All his canvases presented in Sukhum perished in the fire.