Exhibition "El Lisitzky" is the first large-scale retrospective of the famous artist in Russia and a joint project of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center and the State Tretyakov Gallery. El Lisitzky is one of the leading artists of the Russian and European avant-garde, who has largely impacted the development of architecture and design of the 20th century. He is known as the inventor of a new art trend named "Proun", which stands for “Project of Approving the New”.
The exhibition project consists of two parts and will simultaneously be held in two venues: the New Tretyakov Gallery and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. The visitors will see about 400 exhibits from collections of Russian and foreign museums, as well as private collections. The exhibition will trace the artist’s creative career, with all of its stages and directions.
The early, "pre-avant-garde" period of El Lisitzky's creativity and works related to his activity in the Culture League (Jewish cultural and public organization) will be presented at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. In addition, the exhibition will include his work as a graphic designer and theater artist, as well as prouns, photo collages, typography, photomontages, manuscripts and documentary photographs.
About 200 works will be exhibited in the Tretyakov Gallery halls, including prouns and architectural projects, sketches of exhibition design projects, and photos from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery. For the first time in Russia, six proun paintings by El Lisitzky from the largest foreign collections will be shown here. There is no single painting by the artist in Russian museums. These works were created by El Lissitzky in Germany, where he was on a cultural mission in the early 1920s.
The two parts of the large retrospective exhibition will present El Lisitzky as a universal artist: a painter, book graphic illustrator, stage designer, graphic designer, architect, and photographer.
Zelphira Tregulova, General Director of the State Tretyakov Gallery, said: "El Lisitsky is the most important figure in the art culture of the 20th century. Unfortunately, his work, which is extremely popular in the West, is not well known in Russia. The exhibition gives the first ever opportunity for the people in Russia to see what was made by El Lisitzky, the way he elaborated the ideas of Kazimir Malevich, his teacher at some point, how he created his own art trend and his own type of art works. El Lisitzky translated Malevich’ ideas into three-dimensional space, having moved from flat suprematist compositions to 3D art objects. This largely determined the aesthetics of European and world architecture of the twentieth century. The artist’s role in the history of photography, poster and advertising, as well as exhibition design cannot be overestimated - everything that has been done in these areas from the 1920s and 1930s, owes a lot to El Lisitzky”.
The exhibition runs from November 16, 2017 to February 18, 2018 at the New Tretyakov Gallery (at the address: 10, Krymsky Val Street (halls 80-82)) and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (at the address: 11/1A, Obraztsova Street, next to Oktyabrskaya and Park Kultury metro stations, Moscow)
See details on the website of the New Tretyakov Gallery
Author: Vera Ivanova