«Empty space and the whole Universe…». Stage designer Tatyana Shvets’ personal exhibition

The first personal exhibition of the theatre designer Tatyana Shvets in Russia, held at the Bakhrushin Museum, is devoted to the artist’s 80th birthday. Member of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation, Honored Artist of Latvia, Tatyana Shvets has created more than 170 productions in various theatres in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Poland. Despite of that, the artist’s only small personal exhibition took place in Riga in 1984.

In 1959 Tatyana Shvets graduated from the study course of the legendary artist and director Nikolay Akimov at the Ostrovsky Leningrad Theatre Institute. She worked as an art director at the Izhevsk Russian Theatre and the Kaliningrad Regional Drama Theatre; then she has worked for about 20 years at the Riga Russian Drama Theatre – at that time, one of the leading drama theatres in USSR. Productions created together with Arkady F. Katz, the stage director of the Riga theatre, can be described as a period of Tatyana Shvets’ creative prosperity.

In the late 1980’s Tatiana Shvets returned to Moscow and from 1989 to 1996 she has worked as a set designer of the Nikitsky Gate Theatre. After this the «period of wanderings» began, as the artist calls it herself. In the last 20 years, Tatyana Shvets as a designer has staged performances at the Vakhtangov Theatre, the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre /«A Little Tenderness» by Aldo Nicolai, which is still performed/, in many cities of Russia: Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Ulyanovsk, etc.

In her workshop, similar to a museum, Tatyana Shvets managed to save many of the works that she had created for almost 60 years, beginning with her thesis «Masquerade» by M. Lermontov in 1959 and ending with the production «Pygmalion» by B. Shaw, performed in 2016 at the Tambov State Drama Theatre. The exhibition gives an opportunity to see a lot of details of the stage designer’s work and to trace the full cycle of the artist’s work on the performance – from the idea and first graphic sketches to models, detailed drawings for theatre workshops, descriptions of the technology of making costumes and even hand-carved stencils, with the help of which the fabrics were painted.

The best plays of Russian and foreign classics can be seen in the repertoire of Tatyana Shvets: all the plays by A. Chekhov, N. Gogol, A. Ostrovsky, M. Gorky, W. Shakespeare, O. Wilde… And concerning Soviet plays, working with them was very boring for Tatyana, by her own admission.

Special attention at the exhibition is given to the models, because they allow to show how deeply the stage space, created by an artist, is thought out. The exhibition will display more than 20 models amazed by the fineness and accuracy of work. And all of them are created by the artist’s own hands.