The Samara Tretyakov Gallery has brought together 88 works by 42 artists – ranging from 16th-century icons and Kuindzhi to Malevich, Kandinsky, and contemporary art – to illustrate how Russian perceptions of the universe have evolved over the centuries.
The Samara branch of the Tretyakov Gallery has opened an exhibition titled «Imaginary Cosmos». Its focus is less on planets and stars and more on humanity’s attempt to conceptualise infinity and its own place within it. The timeline of the exhibition is almost cosmic in scope, spanning from 16th–17th century Old Russian iconography through symbolism and the avant-garde to Soviet nonconformist art and contemporary installations. The display features a total of 88 works by 42 artists.
In a single space, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Arkhip Kuindzhi, Viktor Vasnetsov, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Ilya Chashnik, Konstantin Yuon and Francisco Infante come together. Here, the «Black Square» sits alongside religious icons, suprematist geometry contrasts with landscapes, and the cosmos is presented alternately as a divine order and as a realm of scientific and artistic utopia.
The curators describe the central theme of the exhibition as a journey from sacred awe in the face of infinity to the dream of conquering it, and then to a more contemporary vision of humanity as just one of many possible forms of life and consciousness. This concept is rooted, among other things, in the ideas of Russian cosmism as articulated by Nikolai Fedorov.
The exhibition is divided into four chapters with almost programmatic titles: «The Starry Sky Above», «The Geometry of Infinity», «Space as Premonition», and «Unidentified Objects». Each chapter explores a distinct approach to transcending earthly reality—whether through religion, abstraction, technological dreams, or attempts to imagine the as-yet unknown.
The project curator, Konstantin Zatsepin, articulates this theme through the lens of human limitations: according to him, the exhibition demonstrates how art helps individuals to comprehend their own finitude.
Works for the exhibition have been provided not only by the Tretyakov Gallery but also by the Pushkin Museum, the Museum of Cinema, the Museum of Cosmonautics, the Shchusev Museum of Architecture, the AZ Museum, and private collections. Thanks to this collaboration, the history of space is presented not as a sequence of distinct eras, but as one long conversation that Russian art has been engaging in for several centuries.
Helping visitors navigate this dialogue for the first time is a thoroughly modern participant – an AI guide powered by GigaChat. Its role is to explain the details, symbols, colour schemes, and hidden meanings of the artworks directly during the exhibition tour.
«Imaginary Cosmos» is on display at the Samara branch of the Tretyakov Gallery until 28 March 2027.
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