The exhibition of Alexei Shtern (born 1942), a prominent Petersburg painter, theatre director and production designer, will present a gallery of portraits he has made over the past 40 years. The artist worked for many years in theatres including the Moscow Art Theatre and the St Petersburg N. P. Akimov Comedy Theatre. That is why theatricality is invariably present in all his works, and especially in portraits.

The artist claims that he makes his artistic images ‘according to Stanislavsky's system’. There are both famous contemporaries and unknown characters depicted in Shtern’s works, each of which is accompanied by a small story. In his portraits, there is a dramaturgy of the grotesque, often forcing the author to physically go beyond the picture plane – so that the texture of the works becomes surprisingly three-dimensional. Often real objects or relief fragments created from plaster are embedded in the pictorial layer.

A special place both in the creative biography and at the exhibition belongs to the portraits on tree cuts, where the outline of the faces coincides with the shape of the wooden base, and the rings of years run not only on the wood, but also on the depicted face. And just as the year rings are a sign of uniqueness of a tree, so for the artist each of his characters is unique.