It's Just a Mystery. Around Elena Surovtseva

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the exhibition titled It's Just a Mystery. Balancing between a solo and a group project, the exhibition focuses on the sculptural legacy of Elena Surovtseva (1952-2025) complemented by works of emerging artists that recently came into the spotlight: Alina Brovina, Veronika Malyakina, Nuria Nurgalieva, Alisa Smorodina and Nika Temeeva. This project is Elena Surovtseva’s first posthumous exhibition. Although largely retrospective, it creates new pathways for understanding her eternaly young art. In total, the museum spaces will host more than 100 works. Some of Elena Surovtseva's sculptures and graphic sheets, selected from the artist's studio and presented within the walls of MMOMA, have never been exhibited before.

Expressiveness that permeates all Elena Surovtseva’s works, be it bronze, ceramics or wood, finds a counter-intuitive context and a harmonious concord in the works by artists born several decades later. The work that served as a starting point for the project was Elena Surovtseva's bronze sculpture River (2010) from the MMOMA collection, which shows a figure swept by a rapid stream. The artist’s practice merges academic tradition and modernist language and uses female images as a leitmotif. Their sensitivity became the main focus of the project.

The very name It's Just a Mystery refers to the work Água Viva by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, whose experimental style addresses the unconscious, prioritizes form and aesthetics and is nourished by magical realism. This text was written in Brazil in 1973, while that same year in Moscow Elena Surovtseva was exploring her own plastic language, also gravitating toward magical realism, with its sensitivity to everyday life and its rejection of banality.

About the artist

Elena Surovtseva (1952—2025) is a sculptor, Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation, and Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Arts (Sculpture Department, 2019—2025). Graduated from the Russian State University of Design and Applied Arts (1970). Took part in more than 200 exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Won prizes and awards, including: the Grand Prix of the International Symposium in Nyíregyháza, Hungary (1985), the State Prize in Literature and Art (1996), the Golden Crown of Russia Award, Irida Main Prize for the work Breath of the Sea, among others. Her works are part of collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, other Russian museums, and private collections around the world.