Exhibition: “Grigory Gidoni and His New Art of Light and Colour”
The Shabolovka Gallery opened a new research exhibition on 3 June. The project continues the gallery’s series bringing overlooked and half-forgotten chapters of avant-garde history into scholarly discussion. Following exhibitions on Nikolai Ladovsky (2017), Meer Aizenstadt (2018) and Alexey Gastev (2019), curator Olga Kolganova turns to artist and inventor Grigory Gidoni (1895–1937) and the “new art of light and colour” he developed in Leningrad during the 1920s and 1930s.
The search for a synthetic art informed by synaesthesia, optics, photometry, lighting engineering, psychology and physiology interested Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Scriabin, Mikhail Matyushin, Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné and Leon Theremin. Grigory Gidoni realised and gained recognition for many ideas in this field. His arrest and execution prevented him from completing his larger plans.
The exhibition places Grigory Gidoni’s art of light and colour alongside the work of Alexander Scriabin and Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, and within a wider circle of artists, composers, scientists and inventors of the 1920s and 1930s. It includes archival documents, drawings, designs for optical instruments and light theatres, lighting scores, models and 3D visualisations. The project marks the 110th anniversary of the Russian Institute of Art History and draws on material preserved in Gidoni’s personal file, the Manuscripts Department and the institute’s library. The institute has studied relationships between sound and light since the early 1920s, when Gidoni was among those invited to contribute.
Curator: Olga Kolganova
Musicologist and art historian; researcher in the Musical Instruments Department at the Russian Institute of Art History; member of the St Petersburg Union of Scientists.
