History and Culture: State Tretyakov Gallery to open "NotForever. 1968-1985" exhibition devoted to the post-war Soviet art

On July 7, 2020, the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, New Tretyakov, Krymsky Val, 10) will open the "NotForever. 1968-1985" exhibition as part of the Cherry Forest Open Art Festival.

A large-scale research exhibition is conceived as the second part of a trilogy dedicated to post-war Soviet art. It includes exhibitions about three historical periods, the Thaw, Stagnation and Perestroika. But if in “The Thaw” (2017) the curators mainly focused on style trends and general ideas of the era, the exhibition to show the period of stagnation involves an analysis of individual and mass consciousness, based on works of art. This is the first attempt at such an analysis.

Also, for the first time, the art of the period of stagnation will be reflected upon in the context of the global problems of postmodernism. Despite some kind of isolation, the industrial culture transformed into information culture in the late USSR. Soviet artists, as well as their Western counterparts, were faced with the problems of searching for identity, mixing languages, contrasting local and global contexts.

The exposition includes eight sections "Ritual and Power", "Socialist Art", "Religious Mysticism", "Communities", "History and the Stopped Time", "Village", "Childhood", "Disappearance".

The exhibition will feature more than 500 paintings, sculptures and drawings from Russian and foreign collections, as well as fragments of films, performance documents and archive records.