The exhibition “Styles and trends. From the avant—garde to digital art” continues the conversation about the development of artistic phenomena and is dedicated to the Russian art of the XX — early XXI century. The exhibition is based on styles and trends considered as stable artistic systems that existed both in parallel and rapidly replacing each other, reflecting the diversity of ideas about the tasks of creativity. Over the course of a century, these lines diverge and converge, intersect, coexist, transform, and reappear decades later. This principle allows us to trace not only the changes in the artistic language, but also the interrelationships between different periods. The peculiarities of Russian art of the twentieth century — the intense change of styles, the severity of the conflict between freedom of creativity and official ideology, the scope of artistic utopias and the dramatic fate of their creators — have no analogues in world culture. The rich collection of the Tretyakov Gallery allows us to fully show the full range of artistic phenomena of this period, to trace their mutual influences and contradictions.
The exhibition includes three sections, each of which corresponds to a special view of art on reality. The avant-garde sought to transform the world and create a new artistic language. Realism, closely related to the state ideology, assumed the role of a witness to the era, offering various ways of understanding reality. In the second half of the twentieth century, artists revisited the legacy of modernism, rethinking the history of art and turning existing principles into material for new statements.
