Exhibition "Portraits"

About exhibition

Mikhail Anikushin is best known primarily as the author of city monuments: Pushkin on Arts Square, Lenin on Moskovskaya Square, and the monument "To the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad." However, creating more intimate portraits and memorial sculpture also occupied an important place in his work, especially his work on images of figures from culture, science, and the arts. "For me, the main object of creativity is the human being and his soul," Anikushin said. The sculptor sought to feel his subjects; it was important for him to retain objectivity, "to show the person as he is," so that the subject would "express himself." Unlike the urban environment, at the exhibition you can come face to face with the sculpture, examine the smallest details, and find traces of the master’s touch. Restorers have made plaster casts from fragments of some sculptures: these can be held in the hands, felt for their material, and compared with the originals. The exhibition includes materials about the Pushkin statue from the Pushkinskaya metro station: visitors will learn about the various stages of restoration and discover how the rowan twig in the poet’s hand, as conceived by Anikushin, turned into a lilac sprig in the monument. Full-scale models of monuments installed in St. Petersburg and other cities occupy a central place in the exhibition: statues of Alexander Pushkin for the Pushkinskaya and Chernaya Rechka metro stations, a bust of Galina Ulanova for Victory Park, grave monuments to Nikolai Cherkasov and Vladimir Bekhterev, a monument to Anton Chekhov for the town of Chekhov, and a portrait of Pushkin for Pyatigorsk. You can also see portraits of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Isaac Levitan, shipbuilder Nikolai Isanin, and many others.