Beautiful Sunday at the Museum of Urban Sculpture

The new exhibition hall of the State Museum of Urban Sculpture is a relatively small exhibition space located in the central district of the city. But to say that the Museum of Urban Sculpture is a small museum would be wrong. On the contrary! It is a huge museum - the museum exhibits occupy the entire city space. Monuments to famous historical figures and urban sculpture are something you can find in all city districts.

Some monuments take center stage in squares, and you see their images on postcards and calendars. Other monuments sit modestly in small indoor gardens and are known only to locals. Urban sculpture has settled in parks, in niches on the facades of buildings and on the roofs of mansions. Monuments and sculptures located in the open air are the main exhibits of the Museum of Urban Sculpture. So why the need for an exhibition hall? I decided to visit the new exhibition space to get an answer to this question.

The exhibition halls are located on two floors. I began my tour with the exhibition on the first floor. Most of the exhibits in the exhibition were familiar to me. But I was used to seeing them on a different scale and in a different environment. These monuments are installed on the central city squares. In the exhibition hall there are reduced models of these monuments. On the walls there are drawings and engravings telling the history of these monuments or reflecting the artistic depth of the embodied image.

Walking through this small hall, you can see a large number of monuments at once. To see all these monuments in their locations, you would have to walk long distances through the city streets. But the main advantage is not in the speed of travel. The size of the monuments is often too large, and some details are difficult to see from ground level So, for example, you are unlikely to be able to catch the expression on the face of Emperor Peter the Great, no matter how much you tilt your head. But in this hall you can look him straight in the eye.

It is even more difficult to see the monuments that are installed in the center of city squares. There's a lot of city traffic around these monuments. Some are almost impossible to get close to. I just recently photographed one of these squares, and it came in very handy - it's easy for me to illustrate my statement. The monument to the commander Alexander Suvorov is set in the center of Suvorov Square, opposite the Troitsky Bridge. You can get close to this monument only in the middle of the night, when the bridge is opened for ships and automobile traffic on the bridge stops.

On the second floor of the exhibition space there was an exhibition of art school students. This exhibition is dedicated to the 105th anniversary of the St. Petersburg City Children's Art School named after G. N. Antonov. The works of young artists impressed me. High professionalism and creative imagination combined with children's fresh view of the world around them.