The exhibition which opened in the Picket Hall of the Winter Palace is the contribution of the PRC to the Year of China in Russia. For the first time in many years, the Hermitage is displaying around 100 major monuments of Chinese culture and art which are kept in the museum of Shanghai.

Great attention has been given in this exhibition to the art of cast bronze vessels. Bronze was a sacral material in the culture of Ancient China. The development and flowering of bronze production can be dated to the second and first millennia B.C. (Shan and Chou dynasties). Already in the 16th - 13th centuries B.C., vessels for ritual sacrifices were made of bronze. One specific feature of ancient Chinese bronze is the noble patina on the surface which formed as a result of long storage in the earth: this ranges from dark black-brown to bright green, blue and red hues.

Bruno Liberatore is one of the most creatively active and frequently exhibited sculptors of contemporary Italy. The exhibition displays about thirty sculptures in bronze and terracotta, and about twenty drawings and approximately the same number of jewels.

Bruno Liberatore (born 1947) is a professor at the Accademia de Belle Arte in Rome. He began his creative work as a student of the sculptor Pericle Fazzini and achieved broad recognition in the 1980s.

Liberatore's individuality and tendency to devise new forms and dimensions began with his first works, which are rarely associated with figurative plastic art.

Adventures of the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich
                 28 June - 15 October 2007    Benois Wing

As it approaches its centenary, the Black Square still retains its status as the most radical object in Russian art.

The exhibition enables one to follow various transformations of this image. The poor square has been quoted, copied, analyzed, criticized, trampled, transformed, conquered, deciphered and even buried... more>

Activity of the Circle of Artists society is one of the bright, peculiar and, at the same time, utterly typical phenomena of the epoch. The Circle of Artists did not take the leading stand among numerous artistic unions of the 1920s, though the acute character and results of creative quests of its members aroused intense interest.

Founded in March 1926 by graduates of the Higher Art and Technical Institute, the Circle of Artists society united mostly fellow-students. In the broadcasting declaration the young artists defined the goal of their creative efforts: "creation of the style of the epoch", "Collectivism" and "community of views" seem to be sure guarantees for the future success. There was another, no less important, argument for the foundation of this society: "impossibility of participation in other artistic societies in Leningrad".. more>