"See the Invisible":
a unique exhibition of tactile paintings

The exhibition "See the Invisible" allows you to touch works of art in the literal sense of the word: tactile paintings based on masterpieces of world painting from the collection of the Pushkin Museum to them. Pushkin can and should be touched.

On June 6, an exhibition of tactile paintings “See the Invisible” will begin in the Perm Art Gallery. This is the first Russian traveling exhibition created by the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin with the support of Sberbank.

The exhibition will feature relief copies of famous works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum to them. A. Pushkin: “Annunciation” by Sandro Botticelli, “Madonna and Child” by Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Still Life with Attributes of the Arts” by Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, “Attack of the Jaguar on the Horse” by Henri Russo, “Ah, Are You Jealous?” Fields Gauguin, “Old Jew with a Boy” by Pablo Picasso. The exposition will be supplemented with a relief copy of the painting “Still Life with Peaches” by the famous Dutch artist of the Baroque era Willem Van Alst from the collection of the Perm Art Gallery. After the exhibition, a tactile copy of the painting "Still Life with Peaches" will remain in the gallery.

Tactile exhibits for the exhibition were created using innovative multi-layered volumetric printing technology at the Prado National Museum (Spain). Photos of the original paintings were processed in a special way, and an individual texture was selected for each element. For example, a character’s clothing is perceived as a fabric by touch. The boundaries of objects are clearly indicated using layer-by-layer application of the material. Thanks to various reliefs and textures, the image can be “read” by hand.

Each painting at the exhibition is equipped with a label typed in Braille, as well as an audio guide - conductor. The main part of the exposition was voiced by the famous Russian actor and director Evgeny Mironov. The picture of Van Alst from the collection of the Perm Gallery is commented on by the soloist of the Perm Opera and Ballet Theater, Honored Artist of Russia Nadezhda Pavlova.

The exposition was created especially for visually impaired and blind people. But relief copies of the paintings will be of interest to visitors with good vision. Anyone can put on opaque sunglasses, turn on the audio guide and discover a fundamentally new experience in perceiving art, feel the picture "at their fingertips", and in addition, it is better to understand the blind people living next to us.

The exhibition “See the Invisible” will work in the Perm Gallery from June 6 to July 5, 2018. Audience 0+

For reference

“Seeing the Unseen” is the first in Russia traveling exhibition of tactile paintings created by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin together with PJSC Sberbank. The aim of the project is to introduce the blind and visually impaired people to the masterpieces of world painting. Pictures for the exhibition were created using the innovative technology of volumetric multilayer printing at the National Museum of Prado (Spain). For the first time, the exhibition opened on November 13, 2016 on World Day for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Moscow and lasted until February 12, 2017. In 2017, the exhibition began its tour across Russia and traveled around 7 cities of the country (Kazan, Volgograd, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk). The cities of the new tour in 2017 - 2018 were Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tyumen, Perm, Ufa, Krasnodar. In each city where the exhibition is located, the organizers select a picture from the collection of the local museum and make a copy adapted to the perception of blind and visually impaired people.