In my MS 2 project, I will look into the repair/restoration of paintings. Regarding the process of Repair, I my opinion people often just see the before and after and miss out on the in-between, which is the most important and interesting part.

I´m really interested in what’s behind the surface. Paintings often change over the years due to bad conservation, if they didn’t like them anymore or the style changed they painted over them instead of painting a new one and by restoring them not only the original painting comes to the surface but also important details which have been hidden behind all these different layers appear again.

I started my project by looking into different paintings which have been restored and compared them with the original version by asking myself what new details have been discovered. Does it still give the same impression? Was it necessary to restore it?

Furthermore, I looked into a project called “Operation Nachtwache” which was a project they did at the Reichsmuseum in Amsterdam in 2019, where the famous painting “The Night Watch” by Rembrandt van Rijn has been restored in front of the visitors. Which in my opinion is perfect for people to understand the process of restoration and to see how important details appear again.

As an outcome of the last weeks, a created a mood board showing my research and the proposal for a potential installation. The installation will be a structure showing a painting that has been restored. I will create different layers to show each step of the process. The intention behind this is to show people not only the before and after of the restoration of a painting but even more important the steps in between. By moving around the layers people can explore each layer and understand the step-by-step process.