The focus is on the still life and landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the time when the flower became a true hero of the artistic narrative.
The exhibition brings together about 150 works by renowned masters: Konstantin Korovin, Isaac Levitan, Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov, Alexander Golovin, as well as lesser—known but no less prominent authors — Mikhail Shemyakin, Nikolai Meshcherin, Alexei Isupov.
Sculpture and objects of decorative and applied art, such as porcelain and glass, are organically adjacent to painting. The works are grouped into thematic sections and are accompanied by comments and quotations from the sayings of the artists’ contemporaries.
Flowers in the art of the turn of the 19th—20th centuries became a symbol of a beautiful era and a rhyme to the image of a woman of the Silver Age. The flexible, plastic pictorial language changed surprisingly quickly: from impressionistic vibrant tremor to the fluidity of Art Nouveau lines and the mysterious color ambiguity of symbolism. The Jack of Diamonds artists and other representatives of the avant-garde used the flower to experiment with shape and color, opening the way to non-objective art.
The epilogue of the exhibition was floral polyptyches by our contemporary Irina Starzhenetskaya. Throughout her work, she remains faithful to the magic of the flower, offering the viewer a look at the eternal theme through the eyes of an artist of the 21st century.
