Echoes of the Theatre. Adagio of a Bygone Century

The exhibition "Echoes of the Theater. Adagio of a Passing Century" is a homage to the Bolshoi Theater in honor of its 250th anniversary and simultaneously a journey through time. The Adagio is called the lyrical duet of the ballet’s main characters. It is a romantic and beautiful melody that seeks to convey the feelings of two lovers.

Artist Olga Osnach works with memories. Her works are captured moments that form a story of something greater, a celebration whose events are carefully preserved in memory.

The graphic works from the "Tickets of Past Performances" series take us back to the turn of the century, to the theater hallowed by the great names of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. Just as the melodies and scenes of the performances spread from Moscow to Vienna, Verona, Berlin, Kaluga, Tver, Novosibirsk… the theater is gone. The music has died down, but the echoes of the theater remain, and it’s sad to watch it go. Theater tickets become a testimony to the beautiful — attending a performance — but also a symbol of a journey into a fairy tale, becoming a kind of key that opens the door to memories.

The Bolshoi Theatre is not only the country’s premier theater, but also a national treasure, its most popular cultural symbol. The Quadriga of Apollo on its façade is familiar to almost everyone — it’s depicted on the hundred-ruble note, the most widely used denomination. Hence the familiar image in Olga Osnach’s painting — a treasury note, which became a kind of state document, cementing the Bolshoi Theatre’s importance.

Witnesses to beauty, angels, gaze down upon us from Olga Osnach’s canvases. They are invisible witnesses to the creation of a performance, a piece of stucco that adorns a magnificent building.

Angels are present, bearing witness to the life’s journey laid out by fate for the theater and for man, for the characters on stage and in life. The long journey, well-constructed and firmly planned, the angels look on with gratitude for the happy journey to the Divine and Destiny that gave life to the theater.

The theater gives us the opportunity to experience, as if holding in our hands the twists and turns of human destinies — the castanets of Carmen, feeling tears on our cheeks as we bid farewell to our son, destined to rule Russia but drowned like a victim in the fire of a father’s conscience, which punishes so severely! We are forced to experience the capricious thoughts of Falstaff, the god of vulgarity, the revelry of Sadko, unbridled in his commercial narcissism. And the death of Andrei Bolkonsky, overshadowed by tender love, and Alexei’s headlong flight into a world of gambling, afflicted with the Gambler’s disease. But thanks to the performances, we can, if only for a moment, be a bearer of their feelings and the masks of their lives.