Forums

Site map
Search
0The virtual community for English-speaking expats and Russians
  Main page   Make it home    Expat list   Our partners     About the site   FAQ
Please log in:
login:
password:
To register  Forgotten your password?   
  Survival Guide   Calendars
  Phone Directory   Dining Out
  Employment   Going Out
  Real Estate   Children
   Tuesday
   March 19
Culture Picks
Culture Reviews
TV Listings
 Exhibitions
 Film
Arts Calendar / July 6 / Exhibitions
Alina Desyatnichenko. Commentary to Community, or How to Win Friends
Moscow Museum of Modern Art is happy to announce Commentary to Community, or How to Win Friends — a solo exhibition by Alina Desaytnichenko, which is held within the Photography/Commentary program of the Museum. Alina Desyatnichenko is an artist, photojournalist and documentary photographer with a focus on social issues. All Desyatnichenko’s projects are based on the body of photographs taken during her communication with members of a particular social group. Alina Desyatnichenko’s exhibition at MMOMA, Commentary to the Community, or How to Win Friends presents several of the artist’s projects, the earliest of them completed in 2015. Most of these projects address the life of various kinds of closed communities, often politically conservative. These include the nuns of a monastery near Rostov-on-Don, novices trying to change their lives at a men’s monastery, and shamans of the Baikal region, as well as the Far East and the Kuban Cossacks. The latter are probably the key community for Desyatnichenko’s research, as she herself comes from Kuban and has consistently studied the history of the local Cossacks and their current way of living. This study resulted in the I am a Cossack project. Another project — School Diary — is dedicated to the formal community that emerged in the boarding school of Mikhail Shchetinin, experimental researcher in education and teacher, in the settlement of Tekos near Gelendzhik, where teenagers were taught in an environment that combined a variety of conservative codes aimed at «reviving Russia with a domestic way of life».
Moscow Museum of Modern Art (at Yermolayevsky per.) 
Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene
Arising as an unplanned event in the Museum’s exhibition calendar and initially driven by the humanitarian mission of helping the art community, Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene was designed to allow artists to implement new large-scale and ambitious works. Thirty-three participants, including 11 group projects, were selected from over 1,000 applications. Although abstract reasoning may appear to be a thankless task, art incorporates the power of imagination and in the current state of suspension this quixotic resource is in great demand. The phrase “speculations, fakes, and predictions” in the title of the exhibition represents various versions of art’s “distance” in relation to reality, a distance that each artist chooses independently in line with their personal working methods. Assuming Distance introduces a wide range of forecasts, insights, and scenarios: absurd, fantastic, visionary, and frighteningly realistic. The works on display address not only the future but also possible versions of the past or present. They interpret speculation in an extremely broad way, from the figure of the profiteer to secret societies, from alternative medicine to technology startups, from trickster investigations and parafictions to imaginary museums. Whether these hypothetical worlds relate to alternative economies or conspiracy theories, new forms of employment and social interaction or systems of control and biopolitics, each of them references the economic, political, and social models discussed or derives from paradoxical and irrational creative thinking.
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art  
Chuck Close. Infinite
A legendary portrait painter and master of photorealism, Chuck Close is one of the most influential artists of his generation, renowned for his meticulous detail and innovative technique, which has deeply impacted both American culture and the international art community. An artist from an era of technological breakthroughs, Close continues to controversially blur the line between fine art and photography. Rather than relying on an expressive impulse or an academic tradition, he has built his art upon his own rules and rituals. As an artist with a deep academic foundation, he pushed the concept of photographic realism in painting to the foreground and further popularized the use of art as a reflection of the power of individuality. In an artistic journey that has lasted more than 50 years, Close has revolutionized the art scene, transforming the canons of academic portrait and experimenting in different forms—from Polaroid photography to oil painting, mosaic-tilework, and tapestry. He has created portraits from tonal grids of fingerprints, pointillist dots, brushstrokes, paper pulp, and countless other media.
Gary Tatinsian Art Gallery 
Decline of the Dynasty: The Last Rurikids and the False Dmitry
From its origin up to the end of the 16th century, Russian statehood was inextricably bound to the dynastic history of the Rurikids (or Rurik dynasty). Princes, Great Princes and Tsars – the descents of the semi-legendary Rurik – had been governing Russian lands for more than seven centuries. The right of the Rurikids to absolute authority was of sacred significance for Russian society. The exposition in the exhibition hall of the Patriarch's Palace tells about the most significant events in the Russian sovereigns' family history in the mentioned time. On display are monuments related to the heirs' accession to the throne, marriages, births and deaths. Among them are remarkable works such as signs and symbols of royal power, items from the treasury of monarchs, personal belongings of the royal family members, family relics, attributes of funeral and memorial rites, and valuable historical documents. Visitors will see the most prestigious and iconic monuments dating back to the last Rurikids. The decline of the royal family at the end of the 16th century gave rise to the chaos, the so-called Time of Troubles — the nation-wide calamity, the very existence of the Russian statehood was threatened in this historical period. The emergence of impostors in Russia was one of the consequences of the dynastic crisis. The exposition in the exhibition hall of the Assumption Belfry is devoted to one of the most mysterious figures of the Russian Time of Troubles - the pretended son of Ivan the Terrible, the Tsar of Muscovy Dmitry Ivanovich, who called himself Dmitry the Emperor and remained in history as Dmitry the Impostor, or False Dmitry I.
Moscow Kremlin Museums 
Dreams of Freedom. Romanticism in Russia and Germany
“Dreams of Freedom. Romanticism in Russia and Germany” is the largest international exhibition project on this subject in the history of the State Tretyakov Gallery. It has been developed in cooperation with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections). This is the first comprehensive attempt to compare on a single platform the art of Romanticism in Russia and Germany. The exposition, developed by experts from the State Tretyakov Gallery and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections), presents in a single venue the works by the greatest artists of the first quarter of the 19th century: Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, Johann Overbeck, Alexander Ivanov, Alexei Venetsianov, Orest Kiprensky, Karl Bryullov and others. V. A. Zhukovsky, a Russian poet, and the German painter C. D. Friedrich (whose paintings adorned the Imperial family’s private chambers) were connected through their years of friendship. The artist became recognized primarily for his philosophical landscapes (“landscapes as reflections of the soul” that embodied his philosophical comprehension of the world). Alexander Ivanov, another hero of the exhibition and a brilliant Russian painter, throughout his life attempted to create a new language for religious art. He sought to express through it a deep immersion and penetration into the essence of the Gospel story. More than 300 works of art, including approximately 200 paintings, supplemented by archival materials and unique exhibits from dozens of German and Russian collections, will develop this art movement in all its versatility, and mark points of convergence and difference.
New Tretyakov Gallery 
French Impressionism
Renoir, Degas, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, Signac, Gauguin, Modigliani, Klimt and van Gogh are presented in the smallest details and in the most unexpected angles thanks to Cinema360 technology. Portraits and landscapes in the format of an immersive show. Visitors of the exhibition will be transported through time and space from Moscow of the XXI century to Paris of the XIX century –called the City of Light, where was born the Bohemia, that totally changed the value of the European art. The manner of the Impressionists to depict on canvas the amazing state of rest and movement, light and shadow are admired in our days, and imitated by a large generations of artists. In nowadays, modern technology allows you to plunge inside the famous paintings. Dozens of projectors broadcast paintings on huge screens and the floor, close-up showing the unique brushstrokes of great artists. In front of the astonished spectators, the sunny fields of the Ile-de-France and the magical streets of the old Paris will come alive, and the exhibition space will be filled with flying dancers and blooming irises.
Artplay na Yauze 
Ilya Repin, Known and Unknown
The exhibition is associated with the large-scale retrospective exhibitions of Repin’s work in 2021‒2022 at the Finnish National Gallery (Ateneum Art Museum) in Helsinki, and in the Petit Palais in Paris, where the Tretyakov Gallery will provide a large number of paintings and graphic works to be exhibited for a long duration (including many works from the Gallery’s permanent exhibition). The works by the “unknown” Repin include paintings and graphic works that were not part of the artist’s 2019 retrospective in Krymsky Val. The paintings by the “other” Repin were created by the artist later in his life. The chamber exhibition will bring together approximately 30 paintings by the artist created in different years, including his paintings and graphic works from the Tretyakov Gallery collection, three female portraits and the evangelical composition “The Incredulity of St. Thomas” (1920–1922) from private Moscow collections, as well as a sketch, “The Son Killer” (1909), a later version of the painting “Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 16, 1581” (1885, State Tretyakov Gallery) from the Voronezh Kramskoy Regional Art Museum. A special focus of the exhibition will be the section devoted to the history of the masterpiece, “Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 16, 1581”, that has been undergoing restoration since May 2018. In addition to pictorial sketches, a multimedia program will be presented to reveal the history of creating the painting as well as the modern restoration processes on the painting.
Tretyakov Art Gallery 
Laurent Chehere. The Sky over Paris
Laurent Chehere first made a name for himself in the field of artistic photography in 2012 with his Flying Houses series, which was exhibited at the Biennale des Créateurs d’Images in Paris. This photographic series was inspired by the architecture of the ‘non-touristy’ parts of Paris and its suburbs and succeeded in reflecting a poetic vision of the city. Chehere decides to depict houses floating in the sky, cut off from the ground, in order to demonstrate the uniqueness of each building outside the context of the urban environment. Each piece of work and each house has its own hidden cultural code, which the author invites the viewers to discover themselves—references to films, real and fictional urban characters and residents of Paris, and many inscriptions and graffiti taken from modern city walls. The large format of Laurent Chehere’s works displayed at the exhibition titled The Sky Over Paris emphasizes the realism of fantasy houses and allows viewers to see the hundreds of intricately put together minute details that shape the character of each ‘flying house’. Laurent Chehere’s The Sky Over Paris exhibition is his second in Russia curated by the Lumiere Gallery. The Gallery became acquainted with Chehere in 2013 at one of the main photography fairs ParisPhoto, and this was when the Gallery presented his works for the first time on the Russian art market. According to the founder of the Lumiere Gallery, Natalia Grigorieva-Litvinskaya, Laurent Chehere’s works were well received by Russian collectors: “He became one of the artists of the Gallery whom collectors come back to see, photography lovers eagerly await the continuation of his series”.
Lumiere Gallery 
Max Sher. Commentary on the Landscape
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents Commentary on the Landscape is a retrospective exhibition of Max Sher. The exhibition will be based on his three series: Palimpsests (2010–2017), Dictatorship of the Seven Seas (2018) and Archipelago (2019). In this project, however, they intermingle with each other, and are complemented by previously unpublished and unexhibited photographs. This project will be the first in the long-term Photography/Commentary Program. Max Sher is a Russian photographer and artist primarily interested in the representation of the post-Soviet cultural landscape and local histories. Sher works not only with archives and history of visual representation, but also uses photography to explore whether an image can capture manifestations of political and economic conditions in the formation of landscapes and infrastructures. His photographs typically depict everyday landscapes, they are uneventful and intentionally undramatic. This approach stems from the US conceptual and politically engaged photography and yet demonstrates the close connection between the artist and his fellow landscape photographers in Russia today. At the same time, Sher’s interest in the politics and economics of space, and the tangential, rather than direct, thematization inherent in his projects, render his work unique in Russia, where a combination of political engagement and openness to interpretation is not often found in photography. Sher’s research has key political objectives that determine the structures of his series, the content of his photographs, and their qualities as images.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art  
Natalia Turnova. The Egg and the Rock
The new Garage Atrium Commission presents large-scale sculptures by Natalia Turnova (b. 1957). Throughout her artistic career, Natalia Turnova has remained outside the focus of art professionals and the viewers, escaping narrow definitions and associations with particular contexts, groups, and collectives. Turnova’s practice is subordinate to her individual evolution, and the project for the modernist atrium space at Garage is an unexpected gesture that distracts the viewer from the “usual” Turnova, with her attention to color, large painterly surfaces, and sculptures made of a broad range of materials. Within the Atrium, the viewer enters a space created by two large heads, the texture of which is reminiscent of natural surfaces. Interconnected fragments of bark, leaves, and rocks create a complex landscape that is a clear contrast to the regular geometry of the modernist space. The heads form what Turnova calls a “connection hub” that links different spaces within the museum. The visitor becomes a witness to (or participant in) the interaction between two anthropomorphic volumes, one seven meters high, the other noticeably smaller and with a seemingly livelier surface of recognisable organic fragments. Turnova offers a kaleidoscope of interpretations for the visitor to choose from. Like many other artists, Turnova treads the uncertain territory “after the end of art,” where the focus of attention shifts toward natural materials and archaic forms that seem intentionally simplified or reduced. The Egg and the Rock is a free inversion of the attraction to the archaic and the primordial, while also initiating a change in our vision and gravitational and body settings, thus healing both our perception and the museum space as such.
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art  
Paweł Althamer. Silence
The spatial installation Silence by Polish artist Paweł Althamer is a garden for meditation built in the square in front of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. To Althamer, each element of the garden—be it a fallen tree or a particular deciduous bush—is a hidden quote, while the composition as a whole is a unique environment where the restless city dweller of today can alter the regime of time, as if transported to a picturesque space in a past era, where the rhythm and pace of life were not by default accelerated to the limit. According to Althamer, Silence is a space where everything happens here and now. It is only in such a space that we can truly find time for ourselves. Working with the community of people with disabilities, with whom he organizes regular sculpture and drawing workshops, has been an important part of Althamer’s practice since 1993. For the artist, this special kind of collaborative authorship represents the therapeutic power of art in action, as well as art’s ability to socialize individuals whose life is otherwise almost invisible to society. For Silence, Althamer collaborated with local specialists in working with people with disabilities to create a number of meditations and spiritual and physical practices accessible to everyone, which take place in the garden at specific times. The garden meditations are based on the principle of audio description (a type of narration used to convey visual information to the blind) and require objective and non-judgmental description of objects and the space, which allows us to experience a reality that seems obvious in a different way.
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art  
Present Continuous
Cancellations and “unrealized” ideas are probably more common in the lives of artists, architects, and institutions than finished projects. As the year 2020 has taught us, our attitude to them needs to change: we should develop a new, therapeutic approach to things that did not happen. Exploring the possibility of such an approach, Present Continuous brings to light incredible stories and names from the history of Russian art, carefully preserved in Garage Archive Collection. The exhibition will include documentary reconstructions of unrealized ideas of various kinds: a dance hall that architect Igor Pyatkin once proposed building in place of the Hexagon Pavilion in Gorky Park; Francisco Infante-Arana’s light and sound project for Red Square; an unpublished catalogue of the Museum of Desire—a collection of project ideas by women artists; and the project for the exhibition Melancholia that Peter Belyi created for the park near the Gaza House of Culture in St. Petersburg. These very different projects were cancelled for various reasons, and those reasons can tell us more about life twenty years ago—and about our new pandemic reality—than some completed projects. The nature of the various cancellations and their delayed consequences are the main focus of Present Continuous.
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art  
Space Motifs in the Graphic Works and Jewellery Designs of Nadia Léger
The exhibition is dedicated to the art of Nadia Léger (1904-1982), a famous artist of the 20th century, a bright representative of the Parisian art school. The oeuvre of this talented painter and graphic artist, who was also engaged in monumental art and design, was the amalgam and reinterpretation of the major artistic trends of the 20th century, such as Cubism, Suprematism, Purism and Socialist Realism. In the 1960s and 1970s, Nadia Léger turned to an early period of her creative career dating back to the early 1920s that of the "flight forms". It was inspired by the dawn of the Space Age. of Yuri Gagarin’s feat stunned Nadia: this miracle, which became a reality, was perceived by her as the ultimate fulfilment of her teacher, the founder of Suprematism, Kazimir Malevich’s vision and earlier dreams. In 1970, Nadia Léger created a series of suprematism jewellery pieces based on her paintings and graphic works in gold, platinum, and diamonds. She presented the Soviet Union with thirty-seven pieces of precious "cosmic" jewellery – brooches, rings and watches in 1976. They were transferred to the Moscow Kremlin Museums in 1980, where they are preserved to this day.
Moscow Kremlin Museums 
Summer Collection
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents its latest, tenth thematic collection exhibition, which is focusing this time on new acquisitions and gifts. Works by fourteen Russian artists of different generations have been selected for the show, all of which had entered the museum’s holdings in recent years — primarily large-scale installations like Vladislav Efimov’s «The Wildlife Corner», Taus Makhacheva’s «Tightrope» or Anna Rotaenko’s «Ringtone», and series — for example, Igor Shelkovsky’s «Mechanical Drawing» and Sergey Sapozhnikov’s «Dance». Created in the period from the late 2000s up to 2020, which is already being perceived from a historical distance — all works have been exhibited not only in Moscow (including solo shows at MMOMA), but also in Venice, Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Vladivostok, and other cities. Now a part of the museum’s collection, they «settle into» the space, yet unfamiliar to them, of the house on Petrovka street. Each project is «reconstructed» in dialogue with its author and freely located in a separate hall, a comfort zone of representation, following a monographic principle. The exhibition’s title, intentionally simple and lightsome, refers to the images, moods and sensations habitually associated with the summer season — as much longed for as brief in this part of the world. It ironically echoes the branding cliches of the global consumerist utopia and presupposes, at the same time, the full range of conditions that one actually experiences in the summer: from euphoria and careless joie de vivre to the distinctive melancholy — that very «summertime sadness» sung about by Lana Del Rey on her Californian albums.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art  
The Iron Age. Europe without Borders
The State Historical Museum opens an international exhibition in collaboration with the State Museums of Berlin. The large-scale scholarly project, dedicated to the culture of the Iron Age in Europe, represents the latest step in the sphere of cooperation between museums in Russia and Germany. The main aim of the international project Iron Age. Europe without Borders — to use the archaeological artefacts in order to show the elements of culture, economics, daily and ceremonial life of Europeans in the Iron Age — the term used in archaeology for the period in human history that came after the Bronze Age. It was marked by people mastering methods of obtaining iron and beginning to make artefacts from the metal that then entered into widespread use. This would be one of humanity’s most important achievements, leading to a rapid expansion of productive forces. The project features more than 1,300 artefacts from the archaeological collections of the State Historical Museum, the State Hermitage Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Prehistory and Ancient History (State Museums of Berlin). The project is truly unique in its breadth of material: the Iron Age in Italy, the Hallstatt culture, the antiquities of the Celtic culture, the famous treasures of the Scythian steppe mounds, ancient monuments, famous treasures, the antiquities of the Koban culture of the North Caucasus and the cultures of the forest strip of Eastern Europe. Of particular importance are the artefacts those destinies were changed as a result of the tragic events of the Second World War. The exhibition includes a large number of exhibits related to the so-called displaced values, exported to the territory of the Soviet Union in 1945 as trophy art.
Historical Museum 
Touch the Shutter Button
As part of the MMOMA Education Center program Collection. Vantage Point program, Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents a new project Touch the Shutter Button dedicated to analysing the way artists are portrayed in the art of the XX-XXI centuries. The exhibition has been inspired by a series of photographs recently donated to the museum’s collection by photographer Eddie Novarro (1923-2003), famous for his snapshots of prominent 20th-century artists. When he came to Russia in the early 1990s, Novarro created a series of photographic portraits of Russian artists who at different stages were members of the non-conformist artist community. Studying Novarro’s photographs, which sought to hold a unified image of the artist-persona or artist-human, the exhibition curators contrasted documentary photography with conceptual work, referring to the works available in the museum collection from the 90s to the present day, including artists’ portraits and self-portraits. Visual comparison led researchers to the logical question: is it relevant today to talk about the identification of the artist’s image? And it is precisely this question that the exhibition will address. Instead of selecting themes, the exhibition approach is based on a study of the methods used by the artists. Therefore, the project has no thematic title, it rather points to a kind of gesture, a process of searching, of fixing. Hence the comparison with the shutter of a camera, which at the moment of closing and preparing the picture, on the one hand, can catch, capture the moment, but on the other hand, limit the interpretation, take it out of context, cut off alternative readings, mortify action. At the same time, the fixed frame completely eliminates the possibility of alternative readings of the action.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art  
“Small” Art
Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center presents an exhibition “Small” Art with more than 130 works by Isaak Levitan, Vassily Polenov, Valentin Serov, Ilya Repin, Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Somov, Kazimir Malevitch, Antonina Sofronova, Lev Bakst, and other artists. This exhibition brings together pieces that usually stay in storerooms (in the folders and on the shelves) after the selection, when the most ‘convincing’, major works make their way into display. Most often, exhibitions do not include small-sized art works, especially when they are sketches or conceptual drafts. Sometimes, however, these small pieces constitute the major part of an artist’s heritage presenting the most characteristic features essential for the understanding of their art. Exhibition “Small” Art is divided into several sections according to the most common functions of the small-sized works. The first section is dedicated to the familiar, secondary function — sketch. Through the works of Levitan, Polenov, Repin, and other artists we will trace the development of ideas from small composition drafts into famous paintings. When the academic art gave way to modernism, artists developed new understanding of an unfinished work and a more easy-going attitude towards the absence of a narrative. This is a theme of the second section of the exhibition. During this period new density of paper was introduced, while small-formatted works present the most precious evidence — style and logic of an artist’s work. Rapid sketch carries movements of hand (Bakst has them sharp and precise), and Konstantin Somov’s aquarelles convey (no need to consult his diaries!) how meticulously the artist used to work at even the smallest of pieces.
Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center 
March
19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31
April
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17
Copyright © The Moscow Expat Site, 1999-2024Editor  Sales  Webmaster +7 (903) 722-38-02