THE RUSSIA OF KANDINSKIJ, NEVER SEEN BEFORE, ARRIVES AT MUDEC
Immagine
Vasilij Kandinskij has arrived in Italy from 15th March to 9 th July 2017 and stops at Mudec – Museo delle Culture in Milan, with an unprecedented exhibition, displaying a rich selection of 49 of his artworks and 85 between icons, popular prints and examples of decorative art. The works, some of which never seen before in Italy, come from major Russian museums such as the Tretjakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg, the Museum of Tbilisi in Georgia (from which comes Kandinskij’s first abstract oil painting).
The exhibition covers the late "forming" period of the artist's visual imagination, deeply rooted in Russian tradition and his journey towards abstraction, from the late Nineteenth century until 1921, the year in which he moved to Germany and never went back to his motherland.
Promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Culture and by 24 ORE Cultura - 24 ORE Group, which is also the producer, and curated by Silvia Burini, professor of History of Russian art at Ca’ Foscari University, and Ada Masoero, art critic and journalist, the exhibition will take visitors on an imaginary journey into the Russia of the artist.
The exhibition, which falls in the year of the centenary of the Russian revolution, and in the lee of the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth, is a "site-specific" project, bound to the intimate vocation of Mudec-Museo delle Culture: it is in fact based on the relation between art and anthropology and on the metaphor of the journey as a cognitive adventure. These are all aspects experienced by the founder of abstract art, who revolutionized with his abstractionism a large part of the subsequent expressive research in the world and has always shown interest in a scientific approach to reality and for explorations.
Kandinskij used to repeat: "for many years I have tried to convince visitors to perambulate inside my paintings: I wanted to force them to forget themselves, even to disappear in there".
Paintings, watercolors, drawings and etchings by Kandinskij, ancient icons, prints, textiles and objects of applied art will allow the visitor – with the help of multimedia integrated installations throughout the exhibition - to understand the origin and development of the symbolic code of the artist, on a fascinating and totally "immersive" journey across his Russian visual sources (the exhibition also features four icons, 15 popular prints and sixty objects of decorative art) from which the artist constantly drew inspiration.
The "journey", the bottom line of the existence of the artist, becomes, therefore, also the bottom line of the exhibition itinerary: a pilgrimage through Russia, its images, its atmospheres, the mental laboratory of the artist, but also a journey towards abstraction and, therefore, a journey into the " the vibrations of the soul “of Kandinsky, a profoundly and painfully spiritual man.
Material for press use and images: http://bit.ly/kandinskijmi