Opening of the Zinaida Serebriakova Exhibition at the State Tretyakov Gallery

On 5 April, the Tretyakov Gallery opens the season’s most important project — a retrospective of works by Zinaida Serebriakova, one of Russia’s first and most beloved professional women artists.

It is the most comprehensive monographic exhibition of her works in the past 30 years.

It occupies two floors of the Engineering Building.

Such an exception — devoting the entire exhibition space to a single artist — had only previously been made for Mark Chagall’s retrospective.

The need for a new exhibition of Serebriakova’s best works became clear after the great interest shown in the 2014 show at the Tretyakov Gallery — the first in Russia devoted entirely to the artist’s foreign period.

The first major exhibition of Serebriakova’s works at the Tretyakov Gallery took place in 1986.

Since then, there was a need to introduce a new generation of viewers to Serebriakova’s art, and to create a gift for those who have long known and loved her work.

A large number of works passed through a rigorous curatorial selection, and only the quintessential key works were included in the present exhibition.

Zinaida Evgenyevna Serebriakova (1884–1967), a member of the famous creative Benois–Lanceray family, was an artist of the Russian diaspora and belonged to the second wave of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement.

Since her painting "At Her Dressing Table.

Self-Portrait" (1909) was acquired by the Tretyakov Gallery in 1910, Serebriakova’s fame at home has grown.

In her work, stylistically close to the Neo-Academic movement, she created some of the most charming female and child images in Russian art.

The exhibition is arranged as a curatorial research presentation and includes several sections: early works, portraits, a peasant cycle, plein-air sketches of ballerinas, landscapes, sketches for the murals at Moscow’s Kazansky railway station, works from the Paris period, Belgian panels, and a Moroccan series.

The focus of the exhibition is on Serebriakova’s most prolific Russian period, during which the artist created her most important signature works.

All her most famous works from the Russian period are gathered on the third floor of the Engineering Building, while the second floor displays works created in emigration (France, Italy, Belgium, and Morocco).