The «Art of the Stage» exhibition will be held in Pavilion No. 1 «Central» from September 10, 2026 to January 17, 2027. «Russian Academic Painting», dedicated to the deep connection between Russian academic painting and theater — not through costumes and decorations, but through a common sign language, oneself and the mise en scene, which has been spoken for several centuries by both the stage and the canvas.
The main objective of the project is to teach the viewer to see the structure of the image as a universal language, understandable regardless of the era and genre. The picture pose, the turn of the figure, the direction of the gaze, the placement of the characters in the space of the canvas — all these are the same tools with which the director builds the scene, and the cameraman builds the frame.
The key hero of the exhibition is the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, without whose history it is impossible to understand where theatricality came from in Russian painting.
Each painting in the exhibition is a frozen moment of drama: an edifying plot from ancient or Russian history, a biblical scene or a myth, where expressiveness in itself and gestures should convince the viewer of the authenticity of the hero’s experience. The exhibition consciously combines two optics — the historical authenticity of the plot and the emotional truth of the performance — showing that it is at the junction of history and emotions that the very persuasiveness that we are looking for in cinema and theater today is born.
A special section of the exhibition is dedicated to the works of outstanding academicians of the XVIII-XX centuries, from Levitsky, Kiprensky and Bryullov to Repin, Kramskoy, Kustodiev, depicting actors, playwrights and theater figures: Fyodor Volkov and Yakov Shumsky, Ekaterina Semenova, Fyodor Chaliapin and others.
