In the year of the 175th anniversary of the founder of the Irkutsk Art Museum named after V. P. Sukachev, the Gallery of Siberian Art presents the exhibition of the Moscow AZ Museum (Anatoly Zverev Museum) “My Teacher Leonardo”. It was to this exhibition that an excursion was organized for foreign students of the International Faculty of BSU.

The exhibition is dedicated to the Moscow nonconformist artist Anatoly Zverev. The exhibition presents more than 100 works of the legendary artist of the Moscow underground: drawings, graphic and pictorial portraits, landscapes, as well as numerous treatises on art by Zverev. The artist named Leonardo da Vinci as his teacher, and the “dialog” between the two artists sounds in the project as a roll call through the centuries.

Foreign students listened to the guide's story about Anatoly Zverev's work in the context of artistic life in Russia in the second half of the twentieth century, learned about the phenomenon called the second avant-garde, nonconformism, unofficial art of the Soviet Renaissance. Numerous self-portraits of “Russian Van Gogh”, graphic drawings of birds and animals, as well as the interactive exposition of the exhibition aroused special interest of the students.

A study excursion for international students to the Art Museum was organized as part of the academic disciplines “Modern and Traditional Art of Russia (Linguocultural Aspect)” and “Socio-cultural Adaptation in Russia”. Such excursions help foreign students to study Russian culture and art visually and emotionally, to share their impressions with their parents and friends about the city and country where they study Russian language and culture.