Socialist realism. Great soviet paintings 1920 – 1970

From October 11th, 2011 to January 8th, 2012 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome you can visit the most important art exhibition of Soviet realism outside of Russia. The exhibition called Realismi socialisti. Grande pittura sovietica 1920 – 1970 (Socialist realism. Great soviet paintings 1920 - 1970) is organized by Matthew Bown and Zelfira Tregulova: the exhibit aims at contradicting the myth of Soviet realism, showing us how artists were actually able to face the strong control of State on every art.

The exhibition presents a strict reconstruction of painting history in the Soviet Union, highlighting some artists, still unknown in the western world, like Deineka, Pimenov, Brodsky, Samokhvalov, Zhilinsky, Korzhev, analyzed according to their geographic position (from Balkans to Kamchatcka), as well as to the chronology (from the revolutionary beginning to the breakup of Soviet Union) of this movement.

The exhibit is focused on the time between October Revolution to 1982; it is organized according to the chronology of those events along seven galleries in the Palazzo. Inside every gallery you'll find different subjects and approaches of every period, and the solutions used by the artists in order to distort the model of the strict Soviet realism.

Following the chronology you can discover different subjects: among them the people, in their virtues and nuances, still the privileged subjects of realist aesthetic. Other co-present genres like landscape paintings or still life, are on the background.
The exhibition Socialist realism. Great soviet paintings 1920 - 1970 has been included in the exchange program Italy – Russia 2011, realized in cooperation with the Russian State Museum of St. Petersburg, the Art Gallery Tret'jakov of Mosow and the ROSIZO e 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo 24 ORE.