Kandinsky and Scriabin at Zaryadye Park Media Center

Kandinsky and Scriabin: Hearing Color and Seeing Sound pairs the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky with archival materials about the composer Alexander Scriabin. The question running through the show is simple to state and hard to answer: what does color sound like, and what does sound look like?

The core of the display is Kandinsky’s paintings, gathered alongside documents connected to Scriabin. Loans come from the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, so visitors can see works from three of Russia’s major collections in one room, set against the archival record of the composer.

The second half of the show moves from the gallery wall to the screen and the speaker. Multimedia installations present Kandinsky’s works as interpreted by modern composers and by AI. A canvas becomes a score, and the score becomes a sound environment that visitors can walk through. The setting suits this approach: the exhibition runs at a media center, not a traditional picture gallery.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and began his painting studies at the age of 30. He settled in Munich in 1896, returned to Moscow in 1914, and went back to Germany in 1921, where he taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. He was also an art theorist, and his writing and his painting circled the same idea that gives this exhibition its title, that the arts speak to one another across the senses.

Placing him next to Scriabin lets the show test that idea against a musician’s work, and then hand it to new makers, human and machine, to answer again.