Society and Culture: Exhibition "Russian Avant-garde: Mechanics, Construction, Life" to open in Saint-Petersburg

The Engineering House of the Peter and Paul Fortress (Saint-Petersburg) will host the exhibition "Russian Avant-garde: Mechanics, Construction, Life", which will be launched in November 2021.

The Avant-garde movement is one of the most significant phenomena in the history of the XX century. The Russian Avant-garde was a multifaceted movement of radical art associations, which reached its heights in the 1920s. The glorification of technological progress, which arose in the West at the end of the XIX century, found its expression in the art of the Russian Avant-garde and manifested itself in the cult of mechanics. Machine aesthetics became a general ideological and compositional principle that influenced not only artistic but also everyday life from 1917 to the early 1930s.

The exhibition, which brings together artworks from 11 Russian museums, will show how the Avant-garde passion for machinery and technology affected the art of this period and everyday life. Artists of this movement promoted the mechanization of labour, popularized technocracy in art and everyday life. The exhibition will feature projects of bakeries, kitchens, mobile and flying cities, plans and photographs of theatrical scenery and costumes, paintings and graphics. They honour industrialization or experimenting with new, "machine" forms. Textiles, ceramics and household items will make the exposition, and recreate the atmosphere of everyday and artistic life in the late 1910s and early 1930s.