Museums of Russia: New chamber exhibition space opens at the Benois Wing of the Russian Museum

In 2023, a new chamber space for temporary exhibition of paintings, graphics and sculpture from the museum’s collections opens at the exposition of the 20th century (Hall № 80) in the Benois Wing of the State Russian Museum.

On January 26, 2023, a press demonstration of the first exposition in the new space is taking place. This is an exhibition of sketches for the unrealized painting The Joy of Life of the outstanding Soviet painter, graphic, book and theatre artist Alexander Nikolayevich Samokhvalov (1894–1971).

The display of the first exhibition in the new space features seven miniature sketches made mainly in gouache on cardboard and paper. The exposition is complemented by landscapes, miniature sculptures, as well as three large paintings by Alexander Samokhvalov of the 1920s-1930s.

In the summer of 1926, Alexander Samokhvalov was resting on the shore of Duderhof Lake near Leningrad. There, he thought of a concept for a large multi-figure painting The Joy of Life – an image of a group of young people at the beach. In this simple everyday motif, the artist saw one of the symbols of the new era. The idea of the painting remained unfulfilled, but the sketches stored in the Russian Museum, made in 1928, represent the direction of the artist's creative search. Despite the fact that the painting The Joy of Life was never created, sketches for it occupy an important place in Samokhvalov's work. The techniques used in them for the rhythmic organization of composition, the transmission of movement and the interaction of figures in space can be found in a number of works of the 1930s.

The exhibition will run until December 31, 2023.