The year of 2024 will mark the 80th anniversary of Natalia Igorevna Nesterova who passed away in August 2022. Her independent creative career began at the turn of the 1960s-70s; she graduated from the Moscow Art School (1955 – 1962) and studied at the V.I. Surikov Moscow State Art Institute (1962 – 1968). A student of D.D. Zhilinsky, she accumulated Western and Russian art discoveries. Her style may be characterized as a return to expressionism combined with the poetics of primitivism enriched by elements of surrealism.

Nesterova’s images strike the attentive viewer by multiple meanings and levels of perception; her world puts together the ordinary and the fantastic, the infernal and the sacred. From the late 1980s Natalia Nesterova lived in Moscow and New York participating in numerous exhibitions of different countries; her paintings were added to museum collections all over Russia and the world.

In December 2024, the Tretyakov Gallery will present a large-scale project timed for Natalia Nesterova’s anniversary providing a nearly complete picture of the artist’s pictorial evolution.

The museum exposition will bring together her works from the earlier period to the last years – those belonging to the museum, the artist’s family collection as well as private collections.

The exhibition will for the first time display large polyptychs devoted to biblical history, the themes of the circus, hunting, as well as peculiar works containing humorous and, at the same time, serious encrypted messages of the artist.

The exhibition will be a real treat for painting lovers and confirm Natalia Nesterova's reputation as a classic of Russian art.