VALENCIA.- As 2011 was chosen as the year of Russia in Spain and Spain in Russia at the Yaroslav Conference, the IVAM has organised two exhibitions to be held in Moscow and St Petersburg displaying, respectively, the masterpieces of 20th and 21st century art in the Collection of the IVAM and the history of photography in Spain with a selection of images by great Spanish photographers, also from the Collection of the IVAM.

From June to October, the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, MMOMA, will hold the exhibition OBRAS MAESTRAS EN LA COLECCIÓN DEL IVAM (MASTERPIECES FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE IVAM). It comprises a selection of pieces by important international 20th-century masters. The exhibition shows the different trends that revived artistic languages during the last century, from the work of artists of the historic avant-garde movements like Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Lipchitz and Sonia Delaunay to movements such as Pop art, with works by Oldenburg, Hamilton, Equipo Crónica, Robert Smithson, Arroyo and Boltanski; from informalist, matteric and expressionist trends with artists like Millares, Saura, Michaux, Tàpies or Soulages, to geometric abstraction or the constructivist trends of artists like Helion, Kupka or Palazuelo. The exhibition also can be approached from the viewpoint of the great diversity of techniques and artistic languages used by contemporary artists, such as sculpture with exponents, apart from those mentioned above, like Julio González, Brancusi, Arp, Calder, Chillida, Caro, Alfaro, Navarro and De Soto; photography, with the work of Belloch, Bayard, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Coppola, Prince, García Rodero and Plossu; drawing and painting with pieces by Masson, Music, Adami, Fahlström, García Sevilla, Gottlieb, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Klee, Polke and Rafols Casamada, and installations and projections by Kuitka, Navalón, Smithson and Fischli & Weiss.

In April and May, the Ethnography Museum in St Petersburgo will show a selection entitled FOTOGRAFÍA ESPAÑOLA EN LA COLECCIÓN DEL IVAM (SPANISH PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE COLLECTION OF THE IVAM), which includes pictures taken by the photographers who have written the history of photography in Spain. Humanist photography is represented by the oeuvre of Gabriel Cualladó, Francesc Catalá Roca, Agustín Centelles, José Miguel de Miguel, Juan Dolcet, Ramón Masats, Carlos Pérez Siquier and Ricard Terré. The most emblematic faces are those portrayed by Alberto García Alix, Tomás Montserrat, Leopoldo Pomés, Humberto Rivas, Alberto Schommer or Javier Vallhonrat. The influence of the avant-garde movements of the time can be seen in the works of Pere Català Pic, Nicolás de Lecuona and Josep Renau, followed in later years by photomontages or mises en scène by América Sánchez, Toni Catany, Carmen Calvo, Pepe Calvo, Enrique Carrazoni, Dis Berlín, Manuel Falces, Joan Fontcuberta, Jorge Galindo, Eduard Ibáñez, José Mendoza, Miquel Navarro, Chema Madoz or Antonio Tabernero. The commitment of the humanist photographers' view in the fifties and sixties is assumed by a new documentalism that offers us an up-to-date vision of current Spanish geography in the pictures of Manolo Laguillo, Manuel Sonseca, Enrique Algarra, Dionisio González, Raúl Belinchón, Carlos Canovas, Francisco Caparrós and José Manuel Ballester.

In the months of May and June 2012, the IVAM will hold the exhibition called LA PRIMAVERA DE LAS VANGUARDIAS RUSAS DE CHAGALL A MALEVICH (THE SPRING OF THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDES FROM CHAGALL TO MALEVICH), which will present works from the permanent collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, MMOMA, in a large-scale show that will include paintings and sculptures by the foremost artists of the early decades of the 20th century like Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Alexander Archipenko, Pavel Filonov, Marc Chagall and Niko Pirosmani, among others. The programme investigates the evolution of the avant-gardes of the nineteen tens and twenties due to Western influence and trends like neo-primitivism, abstraction, suprematism, constructivism and futurism.

The IVAM, whose collection includes numerous Russian avant-garde artists, has organised the exhibition VANGUARDIAS RUSAS EN LA COLECCIÓN DEL IVAM (RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDES IN THE COLLECTION OF THE IVAM), which will be presented in the Museum of Modern Art of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic in the months of April and May. It will then travel to the Fine Arts Museum in Havana, where it will be on display in July and September. The exhibition comprises a selection of representative pieces from the collection of the IVAM by Russian artists such as Malevich, Kozlosky, El Lissitzky, Klucis, Rodchenko, Kulagina, Ignatovish, Ermilov, Mayakovsky, Chashnik, the Stenberg brothers or Stepanova. At the dawn of the 20th century, these artists were the protagonists of one of the most vital cutting-edge avant-garde, albeit fleeting, movements of the 20th century. Political pressures later obliged these artists either to emigrate or to abjure the modernist styles of their youth, but the historic moment of 1910-1920 in Russia was one of the most creative and exciting avant-garde movements of our century.