On May 30, the New Jerusalem Museum will present the exhibition "Light between Worlds"

On May 30, the New Jerusalem Museum, together with the Foundation for the Development of Culture and Art of Uzbekistan, will present a large-scale exhibition project "Light between Worlds", dedicated to the little-studied layer of Soviet, Uzbek and Russian modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. This is the first international project in many years that combines two unique collections formed contrary to all the rules of the Soviet museum. The exhibition will include more than 160 paintings and graphic works by 40 artists, including Alexander Volkov, Solomon Nikritin, Alexander Shevchenko, Kliment Redko and others, from the collections of the New Jerusalem Museum and the I.V. Savitsky Museum of Art of the Republic of Karakalpakstan.

The exhibition is intended as a meeting of two major museum collections of 20th century art. The previous intermuseum project of a similar scale involving the Savitsky Museum, based on a comparison of two collections, took place in 1989, when the book "Avant-Garde, Stopped on the Run" was published together with the Russian Museum.

The exhibition "Light between Worlds" at the New Jerusalem Museum will give a new look at the artistic process of the 20s — 30s of the XX century, in all its complexity and diversity.

Andrey Vorobyov, Governor of the Moscow Region: "Today, Russia and Uzbekistan are converging in many areas – in economics, science and education, in tourism and hospitality, and, of course, in the field of art. Creativity always unites, especially when there is a common history, strong cultural ties, mutual understanding and support between our peoples. I am sure that the joint project "Light between Worlds" will help strengthen the friendship between Russia and Uzbekistan, and will be of interest to both art connoisseurs and those who have come to New Jerusalem for the first time."

The collections of the New Jerusalem Museum and the I.V. Savitsky Museum of Art of the Republic of Karakalpakstan are united by the fact that today their place in the "museum construction" and the contents of their funds remain not fully explored. This is partly why an expanded curatorial team was involved in the work on the exhibition. This gave the project the necessary scope, allowing it to highlight several power lines and semantic centers of the exhibition.

The exhibition was curated by Lyudmila Denisova, head of the art department of the New Jerusalem Museum, Elena Papchenko, art critic, conceptologist and screenwriter, Nadezhda Plungyan, PhD in Art History, Larisa Chernenilova, a leading researcher at the art department of the New Jerusalem Museum. The scientific consultant of the project is Alexander Balashov, an art critic and specialist in the field of twentieth—century Russian art.

A separate focus of the exhibition is the history of "museum construction". Both collections were formed in conditions when many works of art remained outside the official cultural field. It is important to note that it was thanks to Igor Savitsky that we managed to assemble such a large-scale and unique collection. The formation of the XX century art collection in the New Jerusalem Museum began in the mid-1980s, when the museum was still located on the territory of the monastery and was called the Moscow Regional Museum of Local Lore. The acquisition of works by 20th—century artists in the New Jerusalem took place from scratch with the support of director Vasily Nizhegorodov and was a private initiative of the museum staff, who continue their activities today - Lyudmila Denisova (now head of the art department and curator of paintings) and Larisa Chernenilova (now a leading researcher).

The exhibition is structured as a sequence of thematic sections reflecting the search for artists of the 1920s and 1930s. The section "Masters of the New East" presents works that form the image of the East and national modernism (Alexander Volkov, Nikolai Karakhan, Ural Tansykbayev and others). "Faces of Time" is dedicated to portraiture as a chronicle of an era and a study of the types of a new society. "Metaphysics of the 1920s and 1930s" refers to the philosophical searches of Kliment Redko and Solomon Nikritin, who sought to depict on canvas the rapid movements of man in time and space, the struggle between industry and nature, the tension of cosmic and terrestrial forces, and the fluctuations of radio waves. The section "Discovering a new world. The Workshop of Painters Association is dedicated to the artists Alexander Shevchenko, Rostislav Barto, Nikolai Witting and others, who defended the importance of easel painting as a carrier of spiritual experience and true meanings of history against the background of a passion for industrial production and design. Each of the sections emphasizes the polyphony and experimental spirit of the time, preserving the uniqueness of the author's statements.

Sound installations will also be part of the exhibition: visitors will be able to hear the "voices" of the artists represented at the exhibition, whose statements will be accompanied by music — from classical works to almost forgotten works by Soviet composers of the 1920s and 1930s.

A scientific catalog is being published as part of the exhibition, a series of souvenirs is being prepared, and a program of thematic events for adults and children has been formed.