The Center has played a substantial role in uncovering and bringing to light important, largely unknown chapters in the history of universal art in the West. Once again, the tireless work of the group of scholars led by professors Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri fulfills its mission with the exhibition Uzbekistan: Avant-Garde in the Desert. Form and Symbol, hosted in the Ca’ Foscari Exhibition spaces. The exhibition offers an extraordinary and still little-known vision of early 20th-century art in the regions of Central Asia, a distant territory known by a name more mythological than geographical, Turkestan.

Promoted and supported by the Uzbekistan Culture Foundation, the exhibition spans from the late 19th century to 1945, featuring a hundred works, mainly paintings on canvas and paper, along with emblematic artifacts from the Uzbek textile tradition sourced from the National Museum of Tashkent and the Savitsky Museum of Nukus. For the first time, precise relationships are established between the two most important 20th-century art collections in Uzbekistan. The exhibition highlights the formation of a new aesthetic and a new pictorial language in a region that is predominantly Muslim. This represents a kind of explosion, with strong cultural assimilation, which is also evident in Russian painting, incorporating a foreign model that leads to its creative appropriation, generating new meanings.

Until now, the works and even the most innovative artists working in Central Asia in the third and fourth decades of the 20th century were considered a peripheral and marginal offshoot of the significant developments taking place in Russian capitals from 1898 to 1922 by an extraordinary generation of artists (Fal’k, Kandinsky, Ekster, Lentulov, Rodchenko, etc.). What becomes evident is the genesis and subsequent development of a national school, a unique and fascinating “Oriental Avant-Garde.” An intercultural dialogue among Uzbek, Kazakh, Armenian, Eastern Russian, and Siberian artists, almost all trained in Moscow and St. Petersburg, emerges as an inclusive Avant-Garde of confrontation and collaboration, meetings, and common influences.

The exhibition chose to place on an equal footing the graphic pictorial signs and those of the applied arts, with a selection of highly modern textile artifacts, however derived from a deeply symbolic cultural heritage, linked to ancient cults and millenary practices.

Featured image: Kandinsky V.V., Composizione, 1920