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| | Arts Calendar / March 7 / Exhibitions |
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| Dmitry Nalbandyan. Impossibleisimpossible |
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 The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents a large-scale exhibition Impossibleisimpossible that will feature works by the People’s Artist of the USSR Dmitry Nalbandyan and is timed to the 30th anniversary of the Nalbandyan Workshop Museum, which since 2018 is part of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The project will showcase the genre and thematic diversity of Nalbandyan’s artistic heritage as well as the significance of his work for the history of Russian art. The exhibition at 25 Petrovka Street will be a key stage in the museum’s rethinking, updating, and repositioning the collection of the Nalbandyan Workshop Museum. The biography of Dmitry Nalbandyan is a story of a man who witnessed many historical events of his time. His career began in the early 1930s, and he quickly became famous as a master of the Soviet ceremonial portrait. Nalbandyan painted the leaders of the Soviet state, rulers of other countries, politicians, military leaders, scientists, and cosmonauts. The core of the artist’s official heritage is an extensive cycle dedicated to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The so-called Leniniana includes hundreds of works in various types and genres: multi-figure compositions showing key episodes of the revolutionary events of the early XX century, ceremonial portraits, works of a more intimate character and numerous portrait sketches. Besides historical paintings, Dmitry Nalbandyan is known for his landscapes and numerous still lifes, which stand in stark contrast to his works on historical events and the revolution. A study of Dmitry Nalbandyan’s personality, his environment, and his methods of working on historical paintings allows one to track the evolution of Soviet official art.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art  |
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| Egor Koshelev. Gestalt of the Artist |
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 Egor Koshelev is a keen observer of contemporary culture, known for his critique and ironic commentary. His early projects involved the aesthetics of graffiti: for a while he worked on this type of street art. Then the figure of the artist became the focus of Koshelev's attention. For him, the authors turned out to be even more interesting than their work. This is how a story about a fictional artist appeared. It is surrealistic, parodic, but also full of introspection. Today, the artist uses quotes from art history dating from the Renaissance and realism to street art and cinema, composing arts-themed rebuses and messages. In his surreal world, mythological monsters coexist with modern fashion and technology. Koshelev continues to engage with the problem of the artist's place in the world. His alter ego The Last Artist is a reflective and ambitious character typical of the Moscow art scene. The ironic title of the project Gestalt of the Artist or Unexpected Retrospective can be broken down into several main components. It plays on one of the cross-cutting themes of Egor Koshelev's work – the artist's image, its internal structure and development. According to Koshelev, “the title leads away from the suffocating seriousness of the statement”. His work is full of satirical and playful intonations.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art on Gogolevsky bulv |
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| Evgeniya Buravleva: Small Homeland |
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 The project of the famous artist, one of the main figures in Russian painting today, is about her native places in the north of the Kirov region. A more universal meaning is the relationship of a person with the neighbourhood, the search for an authentic home, and the recovery of ties with the moments of an elusive existence. The exhibition is based on the new series Untamed Landscapes, which captures unremarkable, but significant for Buravleva locations in the Vaga village neighbourhood – fields, roads, hills, which have been on her mental map since childhood. Buravleva is inspired by the ascetic nature of the taiga region and yet “reads” her native landscape with a critical eye. She spots subtle traces of its transformation, whether because of agricultural land use, which shrank significantly in the post–Soviet period, or, on the contrary, because of intensive, year-round timber extraction. Fifteen large-format paintings with a recognizable enamel-like surface are created with an emphasis on lighting effects and the geometric tectonics of the visualised world. Forming illusionistic breakthroughs-windows in the museum halls, they are sequentially distributed throughout the exhibition according to the four seasons. This meditative pictorial calendar plays on the archetypes of perception of landscape art. It reveals a non-public yet poignant, poeticised image of Russia. Private experience and momentary problems are juxtaposed with eternal meanings.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art on Gogolevsky bulv |
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| Jewish Avant-Garde. Chagall, Altman, Shterenberg, and Others |
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 The show will trace the emergence and development of Jewish modernism as a trailblazing phenomenon in 20th-century art. The exhibition explores one of the most dynamic periods in the culture of Russian Jews. The 1917 Revolution proclaimed the equality of all nations, which was followed by the abolition of residency restrictions for Jews that had been in force in the Russian Empire. As a result, dozens of talented Jewish artists and writers moved to Moscow and Petrograd, where they played a crucial role in shaping and advancing Soviet avant-garde. Thanks to newfound creative freedom, Jewish culture entered a period of unprecedented resurgence. Some of the finest Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Joseph Chaikov, Eliezer (El) Lissitzky, David Shterenberg, and other artists from various groups and movements made ingenious use of modernism’s innovations in their experiments as they sought to create «new Jewish art.»
Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center |
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| Kaleidoscope of Collections. Rarities of the Museum Collection |
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 The Museum of Contemporary History of Russia collection (former the Museum of the Revolution of the USSR) was formed under the influence of the events taking place in the state. Initially, the museum was created as the museum of the revolutionary and democratic movement, and it saw its main tasks as showing the glorious revolutionary past, the chanting of the fighters against the autocracy, the story about the history of the CPSU (b). However, from the very first days, the museum began to receive not only documentary materials, but also the material relics. The museum actively complicated propaganda porcelain, art lacquers, metal and glass objects symbolizing the struggle of the working class for the fair world. When completing art collections, the plot has always been very important for the museum — the historical event reflected in the particular work, the disclosure of the surrounding life actual themes by artistic means. Thus, the collection of decorative and applied arts was gradually formed. The Museum of the Revolution storages were actively replenished with the gifts from the Soviet and foreign delegations to leaders of the state, prominent political and economic figures of the country, as well as with the products made in the single copy for the opening of various congresses and party conferences. Despite the fact that these items were created by the best masters of their time, not all of them could be exhibited in the permanent exhibition. In different years, the museum staff found many ways to show art relics to visitors: these were exhibitions of gifts, and visible storage of museum collections, and, finally, the exhibition that you see now — “Kaleidoscope of Collections. Rarities of the Museum Collection”.
Museum of Contemporary History of Russia |
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 Roerich’s art is an exceptional phenomenon in the history of Russian and world art. Roerich’s paintings attract with the original themes that are full of poetry and mystery, freedom of thought and profound symbolism. Nicholas Roerich’s remarkable life is alike to a wonderful legend. His life journey started in Russia, continued in Europe and America, and was completed in Asia. This exhibition project will present Roerich’s heritage as an integral phenomenon of Russian and world culture; it will also illustrate the artist’s expansive and versatile creative path from 1897 to 1947. The exhibition will include works of art and documents. Viewers will see more than a hundred paintings and graphic sheets, from the famous early masterpieces, «The Messenger» and «Guests from Overseas» (both in the State Tretyakov Gallery), to the works created during the Indian period, «Guga Chauhan» (State Tretyakov Gallery) and «The Emissary» (State Museum of Oriental Art). Roerich will be presented at the exhibition both as a «master of mountains», who created easel works, and as an artist who successfully implemented his talent in theater and architecture. The audience will see for the first time the magnificent backdrop made by Nicholas Roerich in 1908 for the Polovtsian Dances Ballet, which was staged in Paris as part of the first season of the famous enterprise «The Russian Ballet of Sergei Diaghilev». The size of the grand canvas is 10?23 meters. From now on, this exhibit is considered as the largest piece in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. It was acquired by the Gallery and transported to Moscow from abroad in 2021. For many decades, the canvas was stored rolled on a rod and now it requires extensive restoration. The first stage of restoration will have been completed by Roerich’s exhibition opening.
Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val |
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| The Age of Sports. To the 100th anniversary of Moscow sports |
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 The exhibition includes more than 150 works of painting, graphics, sculpture and monumental art from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Kursk Deineka Art Gallery, Murmansk Regional Art Museum, Yaroslavl Art Museum, Astrakhan Dogadin Art Gallery and other regional museums. The theme of sports appeared in Russian art in the 1920s and 1930s and immediately became essential. At that time, the development of sports was inseparable from the task of forming a «new man», a builder of the communist state. Large-scale construction of stadiums was underway, and sports societies and associations grew in number. The ubiquitous passion for sports was reflected both in the works of the younger generation of artists of those years and in their direct involvement in various means of sport. For example, Yuri Pimenov played football and was an avid fan, Alexander Deineka practiced boxing, and Georgy Nissky admitted that he sometimes «painted at odd moments between competitions and matches, and stayed in the gym just to pop in the studio». This theme was further developed during the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war years, when the country was recovering after the battle. It was then that the first art exhibitions dedicated to physical culture and sports began to emerge. Sports life remained the focus of both the masters of the 1960s and for those who witnessed the XXII Summer Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980. Artists and sculptors were inspired by images of people who experienced incredible stress but overcame themselves to win, and became the ideal of physical beauty, courage and will.
Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val |
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| Tinkoff City: Andy Warhol and Russian Art |
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 The new show will include more than 60 works by Andy Warhol and another 50 by contemporary Russian artists from private collections. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with our general partner Tinkoff City. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol said about himself: «I’ll be your mirror.» The artist, who became an icon of pop art during his lifetime, proved to be a major influence not only on American art of the second half of the 20th century but also on global art trends. Warhol's works, in which he addressed themes such as fame, wealth, advertising, and consumerism, gave rise to a brand new approach to the philosophy of art and a new type of an artist’s persona. «Warhol’s brand» was an important beacon for Russian artists during the formative years of contemporary Russian art and the emergence of an art market in the country. During that period, analyzing Soviet history using the devices of American pop art became a popular practice with local artists but, instead of exploring the cult of consumerism, they explored the cult of consuming ideological products. The goal of this exhibition is to start a dialog between works by Andy Warhol and some of Russia’s leading artists and spotlight the diversity, depth, and legacy of the creative methods employed by the king of American pop art.
Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center |
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