Exhibition «Learning from Nature. Landscapes of Mikhail Matyushin»

About exhibition

The exhibition is dedicated to the evolution of a single genre in the work of an outstanding artist and figure of the Russian avant-garde. Mikhail Matyushin depicted nature throughout his life and argued that a painter should not imitate it by copying the outward appearance of fields, forests, and bays, but should learn from it—adopt and embody in his art the deep logic of the organic world. Visitors to the Museum of the Petersburg Avant-Garde (the M.V. Matyushin House) will learn how he put these ideas into practice. The exhibition, based on the collection of the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg, presents paintings, graphic works, as well as sculptures made from roots and Matyushin's photographs. Through examples of stylistic transformations of the landscape, the viewer can trace the full path taken by the master: from his original take on Impressionism of the 1900s, through the experimental images of the 1910s, to the new realism of the 1930s.