The State Russian Museum is the first Russian, as well as the world’s largest state art museum of national fine arts. The museum’s collection includes more than 440 000 items and covers more than 1000 years of development of Russian art – from pre-Mongol Rus’ to contemporary art of the 21st century.
The Russian Museum was the first to utilise modern information technology in its activities. Today, you can stroll through the halls of the Russian Museum and visit its temporary exhibitions, witness the work of restorers and attend museum classes without leaving your home – high-precision photography, multimedia and AR/VR technology make accessible not only the treasury of Russian art, but also unique museum knowledge.
The mobile exhibition “Masterpieces of the Russian Museum” includes 23 works created by Russian masters of the 14th–20th century and introduces the viewer to the key stages in the development of Russian fine art. Included are the landmark works of Ivan Vishnyakov, Dmitry Levitsky, Orest Kiprensky, Karl Bryullov, Aleksandr Ivanov, Ivan Aivazovsky, Vasily Surikov, Ilya Repin, Arkhip Kuindzhi, Pavel Filonov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Aleksandr Deyneka and others.
The basis of the exhibition is a multimedia guide: Artefact, a free augmented reality mobile app. By pointing a smartphone camera at an exhibit, exhibition visitors receive additional information about it in the form of “points of interest”, an audio guide, notes, as well as a gallery of additional images – preparatory studies or sketches by the artist, photographs of the work under restoration. With help from the application, smartphone users can feel as if they were transported to the halls of the Russian Museum and see the actual dimensions of the works. The specially designed layout of the exhibition tablets emphasises the artistic expressiveness of the paintings, without creating the effect of it being a reproduction and without having to fit works of different sizes and formats into the tablet format.
The mobile exhibition “Masterpieces of the Russian Museum”, organised with the participation of the Representative Office of Rossotrudnichestvo in the Republic of Belarus, is a promising start to future cooperation between the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus and the State Russian Museum, and will open in the halls of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus on the eve of the Day of Unity of the Peoples of Belarus and Russia.
The exhibition will run until April 16, 2024.
Exhibition curators: Darina Zuyeva and Elizaveta Krivetskaya, junior researchers at the exhibition department of the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus.
