Uzbekistan: l'Avanguardia nel deserto. La luce e il colore

For the first time, a major exhibition provides a truly organic insight into one of the most original European avant-gardes, the one that flourished in Uzbekistan in the first decades of the 20th century. ‘Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde in the Desert’ is a unified project spread over two venues: Palazzo Pitti, in Florence (from 16 April to 30 June, in the spaces of the Andito degli Angiolini) and Ca' Foscari Esposizioni, in Venice (from 16 April to the end of September). The exhibition project is promoted and supported by the Fondazione Uzbekistan Cultura and is curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri. Presented in this double exhibition are 150 works, mainly paintings on canvas, alongside a selection of testimonies of the Uzbek textile tradition. The works come from the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan in Tashkent and the State Museum of Arts of Karakalpakstan named after I.V. Savitsky in Nukus. The section of the exhibition project in Florence is entitled Light and Colour. The subtitle is ideally derived from an enlightening passage from Igor Savitsky's Autobiography: "These places are characterised by subtle colouring, where colour - in an infinite variety of combinations and harmonies - forces you to enrich your perception and teaches the eye to be particularly sensitive to these highly refined and at the same time intense and picturesque variations that not only make the places particularly attractive, but also turn them into an original school that develops the perception of colour and light and lends particular vividness to the chromatic vision". In the works, created in the 1920s and 1930s by Volkov, Tansykbaev, Karakhan, Nikolaev (Usto Mumin), Elena Korovay, Nadezhda Kashina and many others, regardless of whether they are paintings on canvas or paper, or whether they were created in Samarkand, Bukhara or Tashkent, one enters an enchanted world, full of colour, light, vivid observations and symbolic connotations, which derive from Western, Russian and Eastern traditions: a world that existed long before artists depicted it in their signs. One can somehow perceive an affinity with the works of artists such as Paul Gauguin, harmonising tradition and the way to innovation.