Exhibition "Russian avant-garde: mechanics, construction, everyday life"

The avant-garde phenomenon is one of the most important milestones in the history of the 20th century. In Russia, the art of the "vanguard" was a heterogeneous trend that was entrenched in radical movements and reached its zenith in the 1920s. The glorification of technological progress, which arose in the West at the end of the 19th century, found its own expression in the art of the Russian avant-garde and manifested itself in the cult of mechanics and technicalism. Machine aesthetics became a formative ideological and compositional principle that influenced not only artistic but also everyday life from 1917 to the early 1930s.

The exhibition, which brings together works of art from the collection of 11 Russian museums, will show how the avant-garde enthusiasm for machinery and technology was reflected in the art of this period and what impact it had on human everyday life. Masters of this trend promoted the mechanization of labor, popularized technocracy in art and in everyday life. The exhibition will feature projects of bakeries, kitchen factories, mobile and flying cities, projects and photographs of theatrical scenery and costumes, paintings and graphics that glorify industrialization or experiment with new, "machine" forms and volumes. Samples of textiles, ceramics, household items corresponding to a given theme will complement the imagery and recreate the atmosphere of everyday and artistic life in the late 1910s and early 1930s.