Komar & Melamid, Rodchenko and super bacteria: March exhibitions at Moscow museums
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What interesting events plus surprises for contemporary art lovers are on at museums and galleries in March.
Greetings to people in the capital
Gilyarovsky Centre
9 Stoleshnikov Pereulok, Bldg. 5
Closes 12 May
The exhibition, opened in early March, is dedicated to the history of the topic of migration in Moscow. The exhibition includes items from the museum’s collection, interactive installations and works by contemporary artists.
One of the most interesting sections of the exhibition is where family albums, autographs, personal items and paintings are on display that once belonged to famous people in Moscow such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Reinhold Gliere, Vladimir Gilyarovsky and Apollinary Vasnetsov many of whom were not born and raised in the capital city but nevertheless left their mark when it comes to the history of Moscow.
Tickets 200 roubles
Goodbye Winter
Garden Ring Museum
14 Prospekt Mira, Bldg. 10
Closes17 March
The Garden Ring Museum is the place to go for an exhibition of works by Olga Fokina, an architect by profession and an artist by passion. During her free time, she paints expressionist oil still-lifes inspired by the nature of Moscow and the Moscow Region.
Free admission
Art by Mail
Varshavka Gallery
72 Varshavskoye Motorway, Bldg. 2
Closes 31 March
A new exhibition at the Varshavka Gallery is expected to attract stamp and postcard collectors as well as lovers of Soviet design and those who feel nostalgia for the 1970s-1980s.
The exhibition showcases 1970s-1980s postcards from private collections featuring popular performers as well as singers of that time, and special editions released to commemorate various events. Plenty of old postage stamps will be on display too. Visitors will get an opportunity to send a postcard to a friend.
Tickets from50 roubles
The Art of Saving 5.0
Museum of Tropinin and Moscow Artists of His Time
10 Shchetininsky Pereulok, Bldg. 1
Closes 25 August
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A large exhibition held to mark the museum’s 50th anniversary will give visitors an opportunity to take a look at its depository and learn how masterpieces are preserved. The exhibition, curated by Alexei Tregubov and Alina Makhotina, occupies four halls, the first two of which displays paintings hanging the same way as they are usually stored (with ropes) in depositories.
One hall is devoted to Vasily Tropinin himself with his most famous works, such as the self-portrait against the backdrop of the Moscow Kremlin, The Lacemaker, Girl with Roses and a portrait of Prince Sergei Golitsyn. In the second hall, there are paintings by Tropinin’s contemporaries such as Fyodor Rokotov, Carl Lasch, Alexei Bogolyubov, Silvestr Shchedrin and Ivan Aivazovsky.
In the third hall, museum goers will get a chance to find out about the life of a museum curator and view the catalogues of the museum collection. The fourth hall features small back-painted glass items created using the Verre Églomisé technique.
Tikets from125 roubles
Female Taste
Museum of Tropinin and Moscow Artists of His Time
10 Shchetininsky Pereulok, Bldg. 1
Closes14 April
An exhibition of decorative and applied art from the collection of Iosif Kobzon’s widow, Nelli, will be on for more than a month. The exhibition will showcase porcelain vases, decorative plates, 19th century jewellery boxes made by Manufacture nationale de Sèvres and the Vienna Porcelain Manufactory Augarten, as well as by private Russian and European factories. Theatre items, such as a collection of theatre binoculars will also be on display.
Nelli Kobzon does not consider herself a collector. Merited Artist of Russia Alexander Konov, responsible for the exhibition, also decided to display portraits of famous female collectors and philanthropists from the museum collection.
Tickets from100 roubles
Compulsion
Multimedia Art Museum
16 Ostozhenka Street
Closes12 May
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The Fashion and Style in Photography 2019, the 11th Moscow international biennale, is underway at the Multimedia Art Museum. The Compulsion exhibition features works by the star of the American art scene, Alex Prager. Her photos are inspired by works by Diane Arbus and William Eggleston.
Films made by Prager will be shown. Among them is La Petite Mort (2011), narrated by Gary Oldman, and La Grande Sortie (2016), commissioned by Opera national de Paris. Prima ballerina Émilie Cozette plays the lead role in the film. The soundtrack was written by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
Tickets from 500 roubles
Sensual Ecology of Repressed Suspicions
Peresvetov Pereulok Gallery
4 Peresvetov Pereulok, Bldg. 1
Closes 7 April
Valeria Makarova, a young artist from St Petersburg, has researched the theme of corporality and sensuality. Her works featuring various fabrics are inspired by touch, body imprints and feelings that cannot be revealed. As of 23 March, St Petersburg art groups whose style is similar to Valeria Makarova’s, will perform several times. View the gallery website for more information.
Tickets from 50 roubles
Artist’s Impression of Izmailovo
Kolomenskoye Museum Reserve
39 Andropova Prospekt
Closes 11 August
The Small Exhibition Hall of the Palace of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich is the venue of an Artist’s Impression of Izmailovo. The exhibition features paintings by Viktor Matorin as well as artifacts of the 17th-century Muscovy Russia, icons and curious stones from the museum’s collection.
Tickets from70 roubles
Exercise in White Room
Bogorodskoye Gallery
5 Bogorodskoye Motorway, Bldg. 6
Closes 2 April
Omsk artist Anton Gudkov paints in black and white on plywood and planks. The Exercise in White Room exhibition is the artist’s first on-man show. It features a series of large paintings that gave the name to the exhibition, as well as posters, sketches and some of the artist’s personal items.
Visitors will also be able to listen to audio recordings made by the artist between 2009 and 2019.
Tickets from 50 roubles
Yuri Gagarin: I am an Ordinary Soviet Man
Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics
111 Mira Prospekt
7 March – 21 April
The exhibition marks the 85th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s birth and features unique items that once belonged to the first cosmonaut. Exhibits were brought in from the Yuri Gagarin Museum in Gagarin, as well as the State Historical Museum, the Smolensk State Museum Reserve, the Saratov Regional Museum of Local Lore, the Lyubertsy College named after Hero of the Soviet Union, pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and others.
Tickets from 50 roubles
The Wandering Artist
21st Century Gallery
22 Kremenchugskaya Street
Closes 3 April
The one-man show of Inna Entina (1957-2012), a key figure of the art movement of the 1980s, is devoted to wandering, the search for a path, ideals and justice. Entina took inspiration in Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph and His Brothers, based on the Biblical story of Joseph who was betrayed by his brothers and who forgave them.
Visitors will see Inna Entina’s lino prints, woodcuts, etchings, lithographic prints and paintings, including illustrations for Gogol’s Dead Souls, the artist’s last cycle of graphic works that were published after her death.
Tickets from50 roubles
We and Darwin
State Darwin Museum
57 Vavilova Street
Closes12 May
The exhibition to mark the 210th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin will help visitors to learn more about the origin of species theory. They will see what ancient people – from Australopithecus to Cro-Magnons – looked like, will compare the appearance and body structure of the Indian elephant, Amazonian manatee, rock hyrax and aardvark (they are distant relatives), and will see the results of experiments carried out to study the intellect and behaviour of rats, crows, parrots and octopuses.
The exhibition will also display a very rare exhibit: the original book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859.
Tickets from 50 roubles
Moscow in Alexander Rodchenko’s Photographs
Zagorye Gallery
24 Lebedyanskaya Street, Bldg. 2
14 March – 26 May
Visitors will be offered a chance to see well-known works by the pioneer of Soviet photography from the collection of the Multimedia Art Museum. Eighty-five photos taken by Rodchenko between 1926 and 1938 will help people immerse into the atmosphere of Bulgakov and Mayakovsky’s Moscow. Chronicle photos named The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom, Street Washing, Transporting the Injured, and Book Festival taken in an unusual perspective, show the history of the city and country, as well as the spirit of the era.
Tickets from50 roubles
Komar&Melamid
Moscow Museum of Modern Art
25 Petrovka Street
22 March – 16 April
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One of the most important exhibitions of the month is a retrospect of Socialist Art founders Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Socialist Art was born in the 1970s as an underground parody on Socialist Realism that reigned in the country. Komar and Melamid met in the middle of the 1960s at the Stroganov Art School.
In 1974, their famous Double Self-Portrait was destroyed at the infamous Bulldozer Exhibition. Three years later, they moved to Israel and later to the US. They worked as a duo until 2003. The MMOMA exhibition will show their most known works of various times.
Tickets from 150 roubles
Superbugs: A Struggle for Life
Timiryazev Biology Museum
15 Malaya Gruzinskaya Street
26 March – 30 June
A joint exhibition by the Biology Museum, the British Embassy in Moscow and the London Science Museum is dedicated to the strains of bacteria that learned to survive in the modern world and are resistant to the majority of antibiotics. Despite their funny name, super bacteria are very dangerous and kill almost 700,000 people every year. Museum goers will learn everything about superbugs and people that fight them: doctors, scientists, farmers and vets.
Free tickets can be obtained at the ticket office