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| | Arts Calendar / April 21 / Exhibitions |
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 The project “I - Aivazovsky” combines the format of a multimedia exhibition and a tv play, more familiar to the viewer. He leads the viewer literally through the labyrinth of the maestro’s life. The role of Aivazovsky is played by the popular actor Sergey Garmash, narrated from the first-person in a confidential, almost intimate form the life story of a boy who will soon become a world famous artist. The interlocutor of the main character is played by the actress Lyanka Gryu. The script is based on biographical facts, documents, letters and memoirs of Aivazovsky’s contemporaries. Ivan Aivazovsky (Ovanes Ayvazyan) was born in Feodosia (Crimea) in an Armenian family. A rare representative of the art workshop, whose chefs-d’oeuvres during his lifetime turned out to be commercially successful and in demand. During his long life, he created about six thousand works, most of which are devoted to the sea. The painter’s canvases amaze the viewer with authenticity and realism, although he painted them mainly not from nature, but in his atelier - from memory. Thanks to the widespread success and replicability of Aivazovsky’s works, they turned into an expensive, but as if “dead heritage”. The main question asked by the curators of the exhibition “I -Aivazovsky” was: what kind of person should be the artist to devote all his works to one topic? What character should this person have? Perhaps the answer will help to take a fresh look at the paintings of the famous marine painter.
Artplay na Yauze  |
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| Architecture of the World |
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 As part of the Architecture of the World exhibition, Russian artist and architect Sergey Kuznetsov will present a new series of large-format works written in charcoal on cardboard. The main characters of his works are well-known architectural structures located in various parts of the world. Kuznetsov does not strive for a thorough reproduction of the details of architectural objects. His method can be described by resorting to the musical term "improvisation". Taking the existing architecture as a basis, the artist complements and transforms it at his own discretion, extremely delicately, almost imperceptibly to the viewer. Using a minimal amount of materials - charcoal, whitewash and a few color accents, Sergey Kuznetsov achieves amazing spatial depth in his works, building volumes solely due to light accents. Architectural graphics is considered to be an academic process that does not develop in combination with contemporary art. In Kuznetsov's works, the size of works is used as a tool to build a dialogue with already known architectural structures. The large format of works, on the one hand, gives the artist greater dynamism, impetuosity and freedom of performance. On the other hand, despite their impressive size, the works remain intimate and convey a feeling of lightness and weightlessness. While retaining the features of sketchiness due to sharp broad lines and expressive shading, the compositions nevertheless appear to be finished works. The cardboards are combined into an installation by a large-scale architectural structure that creates the effect of individual frames snatched from photographic film. Due to the use of a cropped type of lighting in the dark space of the hall and seemingly light and weightless metal structures, the works located in different planes seem to levitate in the air.
Triumph Gallery |
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| Bukharan Jews: At the Crossroads of Civilizations |
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 This large-scale project, jointly staged by the Jewish Museum and the Museum of Jewish History in Russia, will present the history and culture of the Bukharan Jews as a phenomenon of distinct Jewish identity in the context of the cultures of Central Asia. The exhibition will start in the central lobby of the museum and continue in its left gallery, taking viewers on an exciting historical, cultural and ethnographic journey, which includes sections such as Home and Traditional Household Culture; Religious Customs; Life Cycle; Traditional Occupations and Crafts, Music, Dance, Theater; Traditional Clothing. The exhibition will feature around 200 exhibits, some of which have never been put on public display before. These include folk art and household items, handicrafts, religious items, amulets, unique historical documents and photographs. Decorative elements of traditional Jewish houses from Samarkand and Bukhara of the late 19th – the first third of the 20th centuries will be the centerpiece of the exhibition as they will be part of a purpose-built installation representing an abode of a Bukharan Jewish family. Traditional garments worn by the Bukharan Jews as well as weaving and goldwork articles are another big part of the exhibition. Most of these works are taken from the collection of the Museum of Jewish History in Russia and have been given by Jewish families during the museum’s expeditions to Central Asia. The exhibition will also feature pieces from the Russian Museum of Ethnography, the Mardjani Foundation and private collections. No other ethnographic, Jewish or art museum has ever staged an exhibition of this scale and scope. Bukharan Jews fully formed as a separate ethnic subgroup in the 18th century in Central Asian Muslim states such as the Emirate of Bukhara and the khanates of Kokand and Khiva. However, their culture inherited and continued the traditions of a much earlier period that dates back to the era of the Persian Empire. During the Middle Ages, Bukhara and Samarkand became prominent centers of Jewish scholarship and religious poetry, both in Farsi and Hebrew. Despite the discrimination and religious persecution they were subjected to in Central Asia, Bukharan Jews played an important part in the development of local musical culture and traditional crafts.
Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center |
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 Frida Kahlo's life and work have been inspiring the world for decades. Among artists, she was a champion for overcoming personal tragedies and disappointments. Frida's story is "two big accidents: one when the bus hit the streetcar, the other when Diego Rivera hit it," 33 surgeries and 145 paintings. Most of her work is self-portraits. "Sometimes I ask myself, weren't my paintings more works of literature than paintings? They were a kind of diary, a correspondence that I kept all my life. I was deprived of three children and much else to fill my nightmarish life. My art is the most complete biography I could write," Frida confessed in her diary." The artist used her talent to portray her own experiences, facing challenges that would probably have broken someone less resilient. Her paintings, full of symbols and allegories, rooted deep in Mexican tradition, mythology, and Buddhism, mainly draw the viewer's attention to the artist's physical condition and to her relationship with her husband Diego, rich in infidelity and breakups. Frida's work - in form reminiscent of naive art with hints of surrealism - has become the embodiment of Mexican folk art, fashion and women's freedom, with the result that the artist has been made an icon of feminism.
Artplay na Yauze |
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| In the Language of Rules and Exceptions. Science and Art |
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 The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center presents the family-friendly exhibition In the Language of Rules and Exceptions. Science and Art, jointly organized with the Polytechnic Museum. The exhibition deals with the relationship between two of the most important spheres of human activity and the many forms of their interaction. The exhibition is held as part of the Decade of Science and Technology in Russia (2022–2031). The exhibition features six interactive objects and more than 80 works produced over the past 500 years, from the Late Renaissance to our days, from the likes of Albrecht D?rer and Rembrandt to installations by contemporary artists such as ::VTOL:: and Andrey Bartenev. The list of artists on display at the show includes Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Katsushika Hokusai, Georges Seurat, Fernand L?ger, Joan Mir?, Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov, Ivan Leonidov, Konstantin Yuon, Yuri Pimenov, Dmitry Plavinsky, Vyacheslav Koleichuk, Francisco and Platon Infante-Arana, Bill Viola, and more. One of the pieces at the exhibition is ‘Crystal of Light. (Low-speed cargo)’, created by contemporary artists Molitor&Kuzmin, who have been performing objects from various luminous elements for many years. The works by these and other artists are on loan from major Russian museums, including the State Hermitage, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Museum of Oriental Art, the Shchusev Museum of Architecture, as well as from the Stella Art Foundation and private art collections. The Polytechnic Museum has contributed items for the many sections of the exhibition. These are rare and valuable devices that take as much effort and skill to create as works of art do. Masters of the past were also meticulous about the aesthetical qualities of the objects they made. Visitors to the exhibition will get to see an 18th-century telescope, a 19th-century solar microscope, a folding sundial, and the only surviving registrier, a device used to record vertical seismic oscillations.
Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center |
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| In the Shadow of High-Rises |
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 The Lumiere Gallery presents an exhibition of Vladimir Stepanov "In the Shadow of the Heights". The exhibition includes more than fifty black and white author's prints of the Moscow period (1957-1965). "Young Photographer" reveals another Moscow: humane, sincere, sometimes funny and melancholic, reviving after the tragic war years. Stepanov, who takes pictures for himself, does not think about the canons and frames, in which his colleagues live. Independent and free, he captures the mood of the era in the best way possible, leading us with his love for genre scenes and urban color. "In more than twenty years of experience with photographic archives - and there have been over a hundred - I would not have called a more open and relaxed series than this," says Natalia Grigorieva-Litvinskaya, Director of the Gallery. Vladimir Stepanov got the camera by chance. This early passion stays with him for a long time and grows into his life's work. His Moscow series of 1957-1965 will be included in the Anthology of Russian Photography of the 20th century. We study the images of Moscow, changing with unimaginable speed: from a small, low, with winding streets city it becomes the capital of the "country of the future". Commune houses, Stalinist high-rises have become the dominant features of the city, while the usual pre-revolutionary views of Moscow have remained in the shadows. However, Muscovites still cherish those narrow alleys, merchant mansions, and cozy courtyards - this is the kind of Moscow that Stepanov's photograph tells us about.
Lumiere Gallery |
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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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| The Heavenly Host. Image and Veneration |
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 The exhibition unfolds the 1000-year old history of warrior saints in Russian art, from the pre-Mongol period to the 20th century, bringing together over one hundred and thirty masterpieces of iconography, sculpture, secular painting, numismatics, phaleristics, arms and armor, jewellery. The exposition in the One-pillar Chamber of the Patriarch's Palace includes seven thematic sections dedicated to the Archangel Michael, to the most venerated warrior-martyrs - Saints George, Demetrius of Thessaloniki and Theodore Stratelates, and to the traditions of piety and sanctity found among Russian princes. The exhibition continues in the Assumption Belfry, where it examines various motifs, pertaining to the intercession and appeal to the Heavenly Host and the warrior-saints in the court ceremonial and state symbolism of the Moscow Tsardom and the Russian Empire; thus, the second part of the exhibition brings together weaponry, orders and awards, ceremonial items from the coronation of the last Tsar – Nicholas II, icons of warrior-saints created in the 17th-19th centuries, banners of the Russian Tsars – preserved in watercolour sketches. The exhibition ends with artwork the Soviet period, including Pavel Korin’s sketches to his monumental triptychs and mosaics, dedicated to Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy. These works clearly demonstrate that in all periods of Russian history, down to our day, the imagery and feats of the warrior-saints remain intact as timeless, immortal symbols providing solace, inspiration and hope.
Moscow Kremlin Museums |
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