BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — The Hotel Kyjev has dominated Bratislava’s skyline in stark, tombstonelike fashion since 1973, a Brutalist holdover from the communist era.

But the building, long closed as a hotel, got a personality makeover in August 2018, when it was dragooned into service as part of a festival plastering the city with street art.

The local photographer Jakub Markech , better known as Lousy Auber, led a group of painters who climbed its facade, daubing it with a striking monochrome op-art mural. “I was thinking about reinterpreting the building , but we couldn’t see it as a blank paper,” he explains now. “We had to see it as an artwork already, and just make a new twist to it.”