In St. Petersburg, in the ArtPro art gallery of the Youth Centre of the Kalininsky District (16 Nepokopolichennye Pr.), an exhibition of works by artists-puppets Roman Shustrov and Maria Kasyanenko called "Time of Angels" was opened.  

In the usual sense, a museum is about the past, about preserving memory. When we created the Museum of St. Petersburg Angels in the memorial apartment-workshop of Roman Shustrov, the author of the famous St. Petersburg old angel, and his wife Maria Kasyanenko, we aimed to remember our friends, to preserve their works - puppet sculptures, paintings, drawings, graphics, toys, and to present the exposition in the best possible way on the small area of the museum.

However, we don't want to live only in the past, showing visitors works and telling them what wonderful artists Roman and Maria were. We are pushing the boundaries of the past by holding "live" workshops. We organise concerts, poetry and theatre evenings at the museum, and look for new places where the puppet sculptures can "breathe" differently. We have three joint exhibitions of Roman and Maria this year: Children's library at 72, Marata Street; the Museum Hall of Grammar School No 238 where Maria studied; on 15 April our puppeteers' works are exhibited at the ArtPro art gallery of the Youth Centre of Kalininsky District.

This exhibition geography may not seem so prestigious. Especially since Roman Shustrov's last lifetime exhibition took place at the Akhmatova Museum. We're not getting ahead of ourselves; serious steps are still to come.

But today it seems important for us to feel the demands of people from different places in the city, to breathe new life into corners unknown to art lovers. It is a reciprocal process, like a discovery, like an acceptance of new energies, a warm exchange of emotions.

We called this new world for our favourite works - the exhibition in the Youth Gallery "Time of Angels". The exhibition is about love and forgiveness, about childhood and the wisdom of life. Roman's sculptures alternate with Maria's works, delicately entering into dialogue, looking at the audience and inside themselves, looking around the space, passionately engaged in their work, like a conductor who has waved his wand (the work of R. Shustrov). They are happy to have a new neighbourhood - "Coffee, Cat, Mandelstam" and "Mama Kangaroo" (sculptures by M. Kasyanenko).

A great friend of the family, the artist Marina Gronina, was a great help in organising the exhibition. She arranged Roman's paintings and his fantastic wooden masks in a single block in a very unusual way. New to the public is a series of pencil drawings by Maria Kasyanenko, which the artist never showed during her lifetime. These pastel works convey a delicate mood, a departure into loneliness, adding a pinching note to the exhibition.

The exhibition is as close to the viewer as possible, even tactile in places. Visitors are allowed to gently tug on the buttons of the "housing maintenance worker's" dress and let her show her true colors by spreading her fingers aggressively. You can spin a reel on a blue carousel and strange beasts begin to move to the sound of the Marseillaise.

We decided to recreate a bit of a museum setting at the exhibition: over the table we hung a lampshade with dolls and angels, exactly as Roman and Maria had arranged it in their studio.

And we are also happy that the sculptures are seeing new light and new people are looking at them. A visitor to the exhibition, Tatiana Tikhmeneva, was very moved by her comments: "At first a kind of light and cosiness enveloped me. Then I was immersed in a fairy tale. It was as if they weren't exhibits, but creatures full of life. I wanted to look at them, talk to them, joke with them. And then I walked to my car and cried..."

The exhibition runs until 14 May 2022.

Photo provided by: Mira Vasyukova, Anna Sno, Anastasia Novopoltseva.

The material was prepared by the Director of the Museum of St. Petersburg Angels - Elena Dobryakova