Serpukhov
The exhibition “Avant-garde Factory. Pattern of a New World” at the Serpukhov Historical and Art Museum is definitely one of those for which you can go on a short trip. Whether you fit it into one day or a couple of days is your choice.
This project in the new restored space of the museum with the unromantic name “Carriage Barn”, at first glance, is one of many that open the Atlantis of the Russian avant-garde to viewers of the 21st century. It’s not just about the rare works of David Burliuk, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Anna Leporskaya, Olga Rozanova from three museum collections: in addition to the Serpukhov Historical and Art Museum, works were given by the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts and the Serpukhov Museum and Exhibition Center. The Russian Museum also supported the project: it helped create a multimedia exhibition.
What makes this project especially interesting is that it revolves around the local history and art collection of the Serpukhov Museum. This is not just a presentation of masterpieces to a curious public, but a cool study of young curators who prepared it as part of the Avant-Garde Lab 6 school program (this is a joint project of the Avant-Garde Center of the Jewish Museum and the Encyclopedia of Russian Avant-Garde). One might say, the final work of graduates who studied the history of the formation of the avant-garde collection in the Serpukhov Museum and the routes of individual paintings that were transferred from Moscow to Serpukhov, and further, for example, to the Sverdlovsk Museum (this is how the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts appeared in the project). But behind this journey of masterpieces, if not across three seas, then across three rivers, another plot certainly arose, linking the fate of the paintings, changes in the system and country, and rapidly changing everyday life. So, next to the paintings and drawings, tiles, fabric sketches, printed boards, photographs appeared in the project…
As a result, the fate of avant-garde art in the native Serpukhov Museum turned out to be inscribed in the fate of art in the twentieth century.
The five sections of the project are the dotted line of a great drama.
The first section, “The Early Avant-Garde Workshop,” looks like a prologue, where the passion for contemporary French art, the works of the Impressionists and the “wild” (thanks to Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, who opened his collection to the public) allowed Russian artists to “stand on par with the century.”
The second section, “Primitive Pantry,” demonstrates how artists adopted not the style, but the methods of the French. And if Gauguin was looking for a “natural man” and a fresh look in the primitives of Haiti, then Larionov and Goncharova decided that all this could be found much closer – in Russian archaism, folk art and ancient writing of icons.
The third section, “Laboratory of Form,” shows how artists are already conducting their own search, moving straight towards abstraction and output, as we would now say, in 3D (either in reliefs or in working with texture).
The fourth section, “New Life,” leaves out the well-known context, after which abstraction turns out to be not a path to the heights of the spirit, but a path to functional design and constructivism. Photographs from the 1920s and 1930s from the collections of the Serpukhov Museum show how the avant-garde moved from galleries to textile factories and architectural studios, creating new designs for things, buildings, and public space.
And in the finale, after a long pause of silence from the avant-garde artists, accused of the sin of formalism and more, the 20th century remembers its origins. The section “Reverse Movement” presents drawings for textiles from the Thaw period by Tamara Mukhataeva and Evgenia Shestera, graphics and painting by Eliya Belyutin, works of nonconformists…
The spirit of experimentation became the main thing of this exhibition, emphasized the project leaders of Avant-Garde Lab 6 graduates Igor Smekalov and Alexander Kremer. We can say that the experiment was a success…
Where: Serpukhov Historical and Art Museum, st. Chekhova, 87.
Website: https://serpuhov-museum.ru
When: on 18 May 2025
Istria
Exhibition “Weightlessness. Alexander Labas about speed, progress and love” at the New Jerusalem Museum.
The largest inter-museum project, which presents works from 18 Russian museums and 12 private collections, for the first time shows with maximum completeness the legacy of Alexander Labas of the 1920s-1930s. The New Jerusalem Museum organized the exhibition together with the Labas Foundation and Olga Beskina-Labas.
Alexander Labas, one of the founders of the Society of Easel Artists (OST), along with Alexander Deineka and Yuri Pimenov, acted as a defender of painting in the late 1920s. In short, he participated in polemics with the Left Front of the Arts, defending easel painting as it had developed over the previous three centuries of European art. Traditional easel painting remained his main love all his life, despite the fact that after accusations of formalism he himself did not exhibit, but contributed to the exhibitions of others – Labas made panoramas and dioramas of the USSR pavilions at the World Exhibitions in Paris (1937), New York (1939) ) and for the main pavilion of the All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition (1938-1941).
The exhibition “Weightlessness” (curated by Ksenia Novokhatko, scientific consultant of the project Alexander Balashov) unexpectedly “connects” these parallel lines of the artist’s creativity. The exhibition space, designed by theater artists Emil Kapelyush, Yuri Suchkov and Yana Glushanok, recalls not only the airships floating in the skies of the 1930s and in Labas’s paintings into a bright future, but also the dioramas and panoramas created by the artist. The latter, however, appear in black and white projections, either as a musical motif, or as a memory, or as a dream. This “projective” world, placing reality between stage and film, dream and memory, is very consonant with the weightlessness that became the central metaphor in Alexander Labas’ exhibition.
This weightlessness, oddly enough, carries premonitions not of space, but of the discoveries of the surrealists. Perhaps the first work to open the exhibition is the 1920s watercolor “I’m Dreaming.” In the foreground in the corner is the outline of a bed with a sleeping person, and the entire sheet is occupied by three huge windows, in which life is not so much urban as aerial – with airplanes, an airship, a hot air balloon over the roofs of houses, a forest…
This dream is not like Dali’s spectacular pictures of the life of the subconscious. But it echoes the searches of the “projectionists” of the 1920s, with the experiments of the Electroorganism association and the Method group. Their authors (among whom was Labas) were inspired by the ideas of physicists that energy is reality. An echo of the search for an artistic language that could speak about the invisible fluid world of lightning, electrical energy, radio waves that shapes the world of man in the 20th century can be seen, for example, in Labas’ 1924 Sochi watercolor “Telegraph by the Sea.” And man, and flower, and the sea here turn out to be the recipients of a telegraph message of the new century.
Labas turns out to be an unfamiliar acquaintance in this project. We seem to know him as an avant-garde artist, one of the leaders of OST, and a production designer for theatrical performances. But behind the upside-down world of the picture of a plane crash, behind the semicircle of airships, behind the landscapes of the street in the morning fog, a suspended moment appears between the past and the future. This is not a landscape of time, but rather a portrait of the soul.
Where: Istra city, New Jerusalem Museum, New Jerusalem embankment, 1.
Website: https://njerusalem.ru/
When: until 25.05.2025
Nizhny Novgorod
The exhibition “Fragility” at the Arsenal (aka the Volga-Vyatka branch of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) offers an unexpected meeting point between archaeological monuments and contemporary art.
This meeting point is their (in)eternity. In other words, the susceptibility of works of art to earthly and celestial cataclysms, their vulnerability, dependence on chance, ability to collapse and disappear forever. This, of course, can be considered a terrible flaw. But one that is characteristic of all creations of human hands. The flip side of this “weakness” is the demand for care, careful attitude towards the world, and love. Without this, there is no archeology and restoration, museum work and the discovery of new artists. Actually, without this there are no museums and culture.
The exhibition “Fragility” at the Arsenal is exactly about this – about the fragility of culture, about the subtlety of the cultural layer, about cultivating a garden. Therefore, the curators of the project Alina Stulikova, Margarita Maslova, Maria Kuzmina connected the antiquities of Egypt and the kingdoms of Urartu, antiquity and Byzantium… The finds of archaeologists in Herculaneum, dug up from the ashes of Vesuvius centuries after the disaster, are only part of the overall mosaic of world heritage.
These antiquities are from the collection of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin at the exhibition conducts a dialogue with the works of contemporary artists. For example, with a video by Tanya Akhmetgalieva and the art group “Tender Women”. The search for traces of history in the landscape is quite a romantic plot. Of course, it is partly a detective story. But modern artists focus not on the reconstruction of past events, but on the instability of the landscape of memory, on its leveling by nature and time.
And the Norwegian artist Marianne Heske is interested in the conflict between the technological and natural worlds. Her video painting continues the traditions of the old masters, capturing changes in a familiar form. The variability and transformation of the landscape here look like nature’s response to the challenges of technology.
Finally, Dmitry Bulnygin’s installation, made using video mapping technology, simulates an illuminated aquarium with fish in which the water level is rapidly falling. The installation, of course, was made long before the environmental disaster on the Anapa coast, but it turned out to be an accurate metaphor for the experience of people suddenly realizing the fragility of the familiar world.
The project, seemingly created as a reflection on frailty, as a variation on the eternal theme of memento mori, turns out to be a hymn to culture, humanity, and art.
Where: Nizhny Novgorod, Kremlin, building 6, Volgo-Vyatka branch of the Pushkin Museum named after. A.S. Pushkin.
Website: https://arsenal-museum.art/
When: until March 23, 2025
Suzdal
The exhibition “Boris Kustodiev. Patriarchal Russia” (curated by Tatyana Merkulova) in the Cross Chamber of the Suzdal Kremlin brought together the artist’s works from the Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve and 9 leading museums in Russia.
Photo: courtesy of the Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve
With this project, the museum-reserve completed the year of celebration of the 1000th anniversary of Suzdal.
The world captured on Kustodiev’s canvases is a festive, theatrical, ideal world. If other artists of the “World of Art” were inspired by France of the 18th century, by Pushkin’s era and poetic estate life, by the time of Peter, seen through the prism of “Poltava” and the “Bronze Horseman”, then Kustodiev cherished this bright world of folk festivities, fairs, and square performances , the expanse and bass of Chaliapin, Russian opera and the adventures of Petrushka in a booth. The sophistication of his canvases was combined with joviality, the beauty of painting with the beauty of nature and the energy of free life. Perhaps, freedom, freedom, and prowess here turn out to be metaphors of people’s strength, and almost every picture captivates, like a colorful theatrical set.
The atmosphere of gingerbread New Year’s Suzdal is the ideal frame for this Kustodiev exhibition.
Where: d. Suzdal, he. Kremlevskaya, d. 20 Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve.
Website: https://vladmuseum.ru/
When: until February 25
Ivanovo
One of the most magnificent museums in Ivanovo (and in Russia) is the Museum of History and Local Lore named after D.G. Burylina. If you are looking for a reason to get there, here it is: just now, on December 26, the Museum of Industry and Art, founded by Dmitry Gennadievich Burylin, turned 110 years old.
The title of the exhibition “110 Rarities of the D.G. Burylin Museum” in this museum sounds simple-minded and not too tempting. Honestly, this industrialist and tycoon, collector and museum creator deserves greater gratitude from his descendants. The museum, which had departments of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, the Far East, an art gallery and a library with a reading room, became a portal to the universe of world culture in a rapidly developing industrial Russian city.
“The museum is my soul, and the factory is a source of means for life and its replenishment,” Burylin once admitted.
Dmitry Gennadievich’s collection is one of those that should be seen at least once in a lifetime. It seems there is everything here: from a mummy from Ancient Egypt to a golden ladle by Faberge…
Where: Mr. Ivanovo, str. Baturina, 6/40
Source: rg.ru
