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Thaw style

Exhibition April 24 − June 9, 2019
In the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art is a retrospective of the Soviet and Italian artist Mikhail Kulakov (1933–2015) "Thaw Style".

The exhibition includes 140 paintings from the Workshop of Mikhail Kulakov in Italy, the State Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, as well as from the personal collections of collectors of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Simultaneously, in the left wing of the museum, works of abstract artists are displayed: Nikolai Vechtomov, Lev Kropyvnytsky, Oleg Prokofiev, Vladimir Slepyan, Boris Turetsky, Valery Yurlov, Vladimir Yakovlev, Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko.

The bright artist of his time, Kulakov, in his practice, most fully represented the processes that took place in Russian art in the period of openness and freedom in the mid-1950s and 1960s. Kulakov was one of the first to set up a radical abstraction at typical apartment exhibitions of the time. In the Moscow period, the artist was one of the first to catch the “Thaw” ideological fluids and found visual equivalents characteristic of it. Creative impulse, vitality, intuitivism, the cult of chance and improvisation, the existence of a break with the past - all these topics were experienced by Kulakov. In his works, the features of the culture of this time are so vivid that today from a historical distance they seem to be the standard of the thaw decade style.

Based on the official websiteMoscow Museum of Modern Art and site Mikhail Kulakov.