From 28 September 2019 to 12 January 2020 Palazzo Strozzi celebrates Natalia Goncharova, an extraordinary female figure of the early twentieth century avant -gardes, through a major retrospective that traces her life against the tide and her artistic production in comparison with works by famous artists who have been for her landmarks such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Umberto Boccioni. The exhibition - curated by Ludovica Sebregondi, Palazzo Strozzi Foundation, Matthew Gale, Head of Displays and Natalia Sidlina, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern - enhances the versatility of Natalia Goncharova (Governorate of Tula 1881-Paris 1962), among the leading artists of the Russian avant-garde, active as a painter, costume designer, illustrator, graphic designer, set designer, decorator, stylist, but also as a film actress, dancer and performing artist ante litteram.

The first female figure to establish herself on the international scene, Natalia Goncharova lived for art in a total and unconventional way. He exhibited in the most important European avant-garde exhibitions, including Munich, Berlin, Paris and London, while in Moscow he participated in performances in which he paraded in the most elegant area of the city with his face and body painted with images and phrases intended for scandalize the right-thinking. Defying public morals, she was the first woman to have exhibited paintings depicting female nudes, and for this she was accused and tried. For over fifty years he lived and worked together with the artist Mikhail Larionov in a free and open way, arriving at marriage only in the last years of his life and only to protect the common work.

Hero of the Russian avant-garde, she lived as an exile in Paris to continue working without constraints. Through his art he has created an original and powerful fusion of tradition and innovation, East and West, making his work a unique example of experimentation between styles and artistic genres. Natalia has in fact united in a highly personal way iconic elements of the Russian popular and religious tradition with the demands of modern Western art, passing through the heroic period of the early twentieth century, that of the Great War and Paris of the 1920s: from the primitivism of Gauguin and from the chromatism of Matisse to the constructive force of Picasso, up to the dynamism of Boccioni and Balla.