The Russian Academy Of Arts

Dates: April 26 – September 22, 2024

Venue: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 25 Petrovka street, Moscow 

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents a major exhibition of works by Zurab Tsereteli – one of the eminent masters of Russian art of the 20^th – 21^st centuries, the People’s Artist of the USSR and Russia, President of the Russian Academy of Arts timed to his 90^th jubilee. The exhibition will be displayed on two floors of the building in 25 Petrovka street, where the Moscow Museum of Modern Art was opened in 1999. The Museum founder and Director is Zurab Tsereteli.  The Project’s partner is the Chinese premium car brand “Hongqi”. The Museum in partnership with the Chinese Brand has arranged a special project “The Silk Road” to be part of the monographic exhibition of Zurab Tsereteli.

The main stages and vivid episodes of the unique, extremely prolific creative biography of Zurab Tsereteli covering a long and rich in events period fr om the mid-1950s till today will be marked with a chronological dotted line throughout the exhibition route.  These are his study at the Tbilisi Academy of Arts wh ere he majored in painting  (graduated in 1958) and his after graduation work for the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Georgian Republic; his fateful meetings with Picasso and Chagall in Paris  in the middle of the 1960s; work as the Chief Artist of the Russian Foreign Ministry at the USSR embassies in Japan, Brazil, Portugal, Syria and other countries, as the Chief Designer of the Moscow Olympic Games; his teaching activity  in the USA in the late 1970s; creation of the most significant and symbolically important for modern Russia  monumental ensembles and urban planning projects in the 1990s – 2010s, as well as the installment of his prestigious sculptural monuments throughout the world; finally his successful leadership of the Russian Academy of Arts for more than 25 years.

In harmony with Tsereteli’s principle idea of the synthesis of arts the exhibition presents works executed by the master in a wide range of materials and techniques – fr om painting and graphics to round and relief sculpture, from enamels and stained glasses  to tapestries and mosaics. At the same time, paintings and graphic sheets serving for Tsereteli as an everyday creative exercise and usually resulting in long-term cycles will allow the viewers to trace the evolution of the author’s pictorial manner, inexhaustible variability of images and impressions. The “Garden of the Sun” of Zurab Tsereteli has been aimed at showing the powerful mythical and poetic space of his works – the space of beauty and vitality wh ere the natural and human, archaic and modern, contemplative and active coexist in the harmonious and creative unity.     

print version