Exhibition Projects of Tsaritsyno Museum in 2020

Feb. 24, 2020

In 2020, the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve will open six new displays, from museum rarities for children to modern transformations of classical studio pottery, from ancient stories to contemporary art of the 20th century. Here are the brief announcements and dates.

Cabinet of Natural History
(New hall at the Children’s Museum in Tsaritsyno)
Opening: April 30, 2020
Venue: Grand Palace

A new exhibition and educational space at the Children’s Museum is about the Russian Age of Enlightenment. It was at this time that the status of scientific knowledge changed, which ceased to be available to a narrow circle of initiates only. The new hall reproduces the atmosphere of the museum’s rarities cabinet or the ‘natural cabinet’, reflecting the cult of sciences inherent in the noble environment of Catherine’s era.

Under a Venetian Mask
May 26 to September 27, 2020
Venue: Bread House
Curated by Daria Kolpashnikova, Chiara Squarchina (Italy)

The exhibition project was organized in collaboration with and supervised by Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (MUVE), which has many artefacts related to Venetian history and culture. Thanks to this unique partnership, about a hundred items from the collections of the Doge’s Palace, Museo Correr and Ca’Rezzonico Museum (the 18th-century Venice Museum), Murano Glass Museum, and the Palazzo Mocenigo (the Centre for the History of Textiles, Costume and Perfume) will be displayed for the first time in Russia. Paintings, costumes and carnival masks, luxury and household items will show different aspects of everyday life of the Republic of Venice in the 18th century, which turned out to be the last and at the same time the most vivid and carnival in its history.

Antique Stories in European Art of the 16th19th Centuries
From Olga Zateeva’s Collection

July 2 to November 1, 2020.
Venue: Bread House
Curator: Tatyana Tyutvinova (
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts)

About 200 items from Olga Zateeva’s collection ― antique-themed paintings and sculptures, graphics, furniture, ceremonial utensils, fans, caskets, table decorations dating back to the 16th–18th centuries — will illustrate the most common subjects of Classical mythology in Western European art. Of great interest are the works by French enamellers, bone items rare in Russian collections, engravings by Dürer’s student Hans Sebald Beham, paintings by Bernardino Cesari, Gaspare Diziani, Sisto Badalocchio, as well as works by German and Dutch artists, most of which will be exhibited for the first time.

On the Occasion of D. I. Vinogradov’s 300th Birthday Anniversary
August 25, 2020 to August 29, 2021
Venue: Grand Palace
Curated by Ivan Golsky, Svetlana Parchak

Exhibition for the anniversary of the scientist and inventor Dmitry Vinogradov (1720–1758), ally of Mikhail Lomonosov and father of Russian porcelain. Thanks to Vinogradov’s discoveries and developments in the mid-18th century at the Nevsky Porcelain Manufactory (the Imperial Porcelain Factory since 1765) it became possible to manufacture products from high-quality fine porcelain. The exhibition will tell about the Russian tradition of porcelain art.

Bird Concert
October 20, 2020 to March 31, 2021
Venue: Small Palace
Curator: Sergey Khachaturov

The name of the fourth exhibition of the multidisciplinary project ‘The Gothic Taste of Love’ refers to a Baroque theme — birds, as allegories of human virtues and vices trying to sing under the guidance of an owl. The plot has been known since ancient times—not only in literature, but also in mechanics, an automatic ‘fountain with an owl’ invented by the ancient Greek engineer and mathematician Hero of Alexandria (the sculpture of the fountain will be on display). In the 17th century, thanks to the same-name painting by Frans Snyders, it spread widely in Flemish art of the 17th century. At the exhibition in Tsaritsyno, the characters of the bird’s concert will become instruments of parodies of the artist Yegor Koshelev on the 20th-century modernist art. The project also involves artists Leonid Tskhe, Evgenia Buravleva, Egor Plotnikov; video art Vladimir Usoltsev, Yuri Godarin, actors Varia Feofanova, Artem Dubra, Anatoly Kormanovsky.

Ceramics. Paradoxes
December 15, 2020 to May 31, 2021
Venue: Bread House
Curated by Tatyana Punans, Yulia Kiseleva, Viktoria Petukhova

The exhibition will be dedicated to Russian studio pottery of the 20th and the early 21st centuries. The combination of items from the collection of the Tsaritsyno Museum-Reserve, created by Soviet studio potters in the 1970s and 1980s, and recent pieces by contemporary artists, will allow one to analyse trends in Russian studio pottery of recent decades, trace the evolution of style, understand directions of searches for new forms and methods of transformation of classical images. The exhibition also aims to assess the prospects for the development of studio pottery and its ability to respond to the needs of the modern art process.