The Maksimov Method and the Roots of Chinese Realism

Entering this exhibition means crossing a threshold - not into a simple display, but into the workshop where Chinese oil painting reshaped its own identity. Here, the story unfolds of a school that, in the 1950s, changed the trajectory of an entire generation of artists by merging academic rigor, Soviet methodology, and a renewed attention to the lived reality of the New China.
The so-called Maksimov Method was a comprehensive pedagogical system. It began with the structural foundations of oil painting - figure construction, the relationship between volume and space, the study of natural light - and gradually led students toward the creation of large-scale thematic compositions. It was not merely a technical training: young painters were encouraged to transform experience, history, and daily life into images capable of expressing emotion, conflict, and collective ideals. Realism thus became a human-centered language, at once precise and deeply empathetic. The exhibition reconstructs this process with clarity and breadth, weaving together paintings, documents, and archival materials that reveal how strict discipline opened the way to new expressive freedoms. It is a journey into the making of an aesthetic as well as the consciousness of an era: returning to the roots of Chinese realism becomes a way to interrogate the present and the future possibilities of oil painting within an art world increasingly shaped by multiple - and often divergent - directions.