Exhibition "Cosmic Horoscope"

About exhibition

The exhibition brings together works devoted to space, each of which has its own distinctive mindset in dialogue with the Universe. The display includes 48 works from the fine arts holdings of the Museum of Cosmonautics, covering a whole century of space painting, beginning with works by the cosmism artists of the "Amaravella" group. A special section of the exhibition is a suite of works by Andrei Sokolov, one of the leading Soviet science-fiction artists of the past century, as well as etchings by masters of the second half of the 20th century – Anatoly Plakhov, Boris Smertin, and Arkady Tyurin. One of Sokolov's paintings presented in the exhibition became the first item to enter the Museum of Cosmonautics' collection. The program piece of the exhibition is the large-scale etching "Cosmic Horoscope" by Anatoly Veselov, in which the artist combined mythology and pages of space history to create an incredibly multilayered and engaging work. The piece was executed in an extremely complex technique and consists of four parts printed from separate metal plates. All of them are included in the exhibition so that visitors can appreciate the complexity and jewel-like precision of the printmaker's work. Of the fifteen artists presented, two saw the blue planet from orbit: twice Heroes of the Soviet Union, pilot-cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Vladimir Dzhanibekov, among the most respected cosmonauts in Russia and the world. The exhibition is complemented by the sculptural composition "Before the Long Journey" by Mikhail Sedov, whose protagonists are two legends – Sergei Korolev and Yuri Gagarin. The blue glass "Flowers", which became an accent of the exhibition, are an artifact from the history of the Museum of Cosmonautics: in 1981, at the museum's opening they decorated the permanent exhibition and were carefully preserved by the collection custodians during the reconstruction and expansion of the museum premises in 2009.