Pareiasauri, Fucus and Solstice 10 exhibitions of March

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art at Gogolevsky Boulevard invites you to dive into the works by Oleg Tselkov, a pioneer of the informal Soviet art, Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve invites you to solve ancient riddles, while the Museum of Moscow presents the results of massive research conducted in Preobrazhensky district together with local residents and artists. Read on about those exhibitions and others in this report.

“Alien”. Oleg Tselkov exhibition in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art

Time: March 2 - May 8

Location: 10 Gogolevsky Boulevard

Age restrictions: 0+

Oleg Tselkov (1934–2021) was a widely recognized pioneer of informal Soviet art who inspired many Soviet artists to move away from Socialist realism. He started his artistic path with referring to Russian and European avant-garde art of the early 20th century: cubofuturism and fauvism. Tselkov’s early works are full of direct references to Pyotr Konchalovsky, Henry Matisse, Fernand Léger and Kazimir Malevich. In 1980s-1990s he grew closer to his Western contemporaries such as Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

The retrospective exhibition in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art sheds light on how the painter has formed his art style. Its eight thematic and chronological sections cover Tselkov’s art from the 1950s to the 2020s. The exhibition has over 100 paintings provided by 25 museums and private collectors from Russia, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.

“Her name was Tatiana”, A. Scriabin Memorial Museum

Time: March 18 - 30

Location: 11/1 Bolshoi Nikolopeskovsky Pereulok

Age restrictions: 12+

Scriabin Memorial Museum opened a photo-documentary exhibition about the woman who changed the Russian composer’s life. Scriabin’s second wife, Tatiana Schlözer-Scriabina, was his Muse and best friend. After her husband’s death, Ms. Scriabina was the driving force behind the Museum inception. The exhibition has copies of the spouses’ letters to each other, documents pertaining to the Museum creation, eyewitnesses’ memoirs of Tatiana Scriabina and photographs that Scriabin’s descendants recently donated to the Museum.

Starting March 2 the exhibition will be presented at the Museum photography display section; after March 16 the visitors will be able to see its expanded version over the walls and stands of the music and exhibitions hall.

“Which eternity did you choose?” in the Museum of Russian Lubok and Naive Art

Time: March 2 - May 15

Location: 30 Izmaylovsky Boulevard

Age restrictions: 0+

The new exhibition opening in the Museum of Russian Lubok and Naive Art, the Folk Paintings hall introduces us to the works by Vladimir Zoroastrov, a Muscovite whose paintings are now held by a number of museums and private collectors.

Vladimir Zoroastrov was born on March 2, 1962 in Astrakhan, graduated from the Moscow College of Theater Art and Technology. He started his careers in visual arts with copying French impressionists. Presently, he’s mostly using the tempera technique.

“Solstice”, Varshavka Exhibition Hall

Time: March 3 - April 29

Location: 68/1 Varshavskoye Motorway

Age restrictions: 6+

This exhibition introduces us to the art of Aleksandr Tarasenkov, an art photographer whose works are being shown all over the world. The series of black and white photographs on display invite us to think about the nature’s annual renewal and the cyclical course of existence. What is the place of humankind along this endless loop? That’s the question the artist asks over and over again. His subjects are silent and tranquil landscapes of the Russian heartlands. Only rarely do people appear, surrounded by nature.

“Ask Me a Riddle. Village Life in Proverbs and Sayings”, Kolomenskoye Museum-Reserve

Time: March 15 - September 15

Location: 39/69 Andropov Prospekt

Age restrictions: 6+

The Kolomna Peasant Home prepares a Russian verbal folklore exhibition that expounds on its aspect that’s probably the most familiar to the modern people: proverbs, sayings and riddles. The museum will showcase items that are not being used anymore, but still persist in folklore. You will have a chance to see them all in the Kolomna Peasant Home: from the front gates to the minute internal furnishing details.

“White Sea Motifs”, K. Timiryazev State Museum of Biology

Time: March 15 - April 10

Location: 15 Malaya Gruzinskaya Street

Age restrictions: 0+

Dedicated to the nature and the inhabitants of the White Sea shore, the exhibition introduces us to the art of Ekaterina Maximova. The artist shows us the mysterious animals (like beluga whale, lumpfish or jellyfish) and plants (like fucus, bubble seaweed) of the White Sea, as well as life and culture of the people living there.

She uses the cardboard print technique, creating bas-relief cutouts on thick paper, covering them with paint, then making prints on another piece of paper. Some works also use natural materials: reindeer lichen and lingonberry branches.

“The Bulgakov Brothers”, M. Bulgakov Museum

Time: March 17 - August 14

Location: Apt. 50, 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street

Age restrictions: 0+

The new exhibition in the Bulgakov Museum is dedicated to Mikhail Bulgakov’s younger brothers: Nikolay and Ivan who’ve left Russia with the White Guard after the Civil War. Nikolay finished University of Zagreb (Croatia) and became a bacteriologist. Ivan was a musician who used to perform with Russian orchestra in various restaurants around Varna (Bulgaria). Later they moved to Paris together. They have never seen their relatives in Russia again.

This piece of family history influenced Bulgakov’s writings in a lot of aspects. Bulgakov wrote his key books in the “haunted flat” on Bolshaya Sadovaya Street: books dedicated to the war, with their characters inspired by his brothers and himself: “The White Guard”, “The Red Crown”, etc. Prints of those books are displayed at the exhibition, together with archive documents.

“Moscow without End. Preobrazhensky District”. Museum of Moscow

Time: March 31 - June 26

Location: 2/1 Zubovsky Boulevard

Age restrictions: 0+

“Moscow without End”, an interdisciplinary project started in summer of 2021 and dedicated to local flavors of the city’s districts, is continuing in the Museum of Moscow. Preobrazhensky district its new focal point.

The project’s idea is that the museum team should choose a particular district of Moscow in order to study it together with experts, artists and locals. The result is an exhibition mixing Muscovites’ personal accounts, photographs from family scrapbooks and personal possessions they hold dear, with museum artefacts, archive and library documents, adding in pieces of modern art specifically created for the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive event program running in the Museum and around the relevant district.

The project website publishes news, articles and other materials. Anyone who wishes to share their stories or artefacts can fill an appropriate form online on the same website.

“Vyatka Pareiasauri”, State Darwin Museum

Time: March 29 - May 15

Location: 57 Vavilov Street

Age restrictions: 6+

For the first time ever, Darwin Museum presents unique Paleo-findings discovered around the Vyatka river near the town of Kotelnich (Kirov region), one of the largest Pareiasauri burial sites in the world. The skeletons of those big, clumsy dinosaurs made a global sensation in the 1930s. For the first time, dozens of perfectly preserved remains of herbivores inhabiting Earth over 250 million years ago, were found in the North. Before that, the Pareiasaurus had been considered a staple of South Africa.

Darwin Museum invites everyone to see the original findings and sculptured replicas of Deltavjatia rossica, the most ancient and primitive of Pareiasauri currently known to scientists.

“The Path of Love for Animals”, State Darwin Museum

Time: March 31 - June 19

Location: 57 Vavilov Street

Age restrictions: 0+

This exhibition, dedicated to the 110th anniversary of animal painter Vadim Trofimov (1912–1981), presents his sculptures and line art stored in the Museum vaults.

Trofimov was an apprentice of another well-known animal painter, Vasily Vatagin. Under Vatagin’s mentorship, the young artist started his creative work in 1928, making a number of sculpture and line art pieces for Darwin Museum. In the late 1930s, Trofimov became fascinated with line art. From the first days of the Great Patriotic War he started to work with “TASS Windows”. He went to the front in February 1943. Fighting at the Bryansk, then at the first Belarusian Fronts, Trofimov made his way to Berlin. After the war ended, he kept making easel graphics and book illustrations. He took up sculpture in the 1960s.