All iconic music covers were shown at VDNKh

A 70-year visual-musical journey explores the history of iconic music album covers and reveals the mystery of how and by whom they were created.

Oh, youth, golden age! There were a lot of good things… Do you remember, did you go hiking? What about discos? Do you remember music records? For a rare fashionable record in a bright envelope, the line to the store was occupied from the night (and even if the record was by a foreign artist, they were recorded in a week)! A beautiful envelope was cherished, boasted to friends, many decorated the walls of rooms with envelopes.

Why this nostalgia? And to the fact that the exhibition project ART & SOUND, which is dedicated to iconic music covers, has opened at VDNKh. Visitors to the exhibition can follow the evolution of aesthetic perception through contemporary art installations, interactive exhibits and archival materials. This will take you on a seventy-year musical-visual journey from the dawn of rock and roll in the 1950s to the present.

The exhibition project also showcases how social changes have affected the music industry, including the emergence of new genres and the fading of old ones, the reimagining of historical imagery, tributes to iconic works of art, and inviting renowned artists to collaborate. Many world-famous artists such as Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg have created covers for music albums by composers, authors and rock bands. Some of these covers, such as The Velvet Underground’s iconic debut album cover, have become milestones in history, while others have been forgotten. The exhibition project also demonstrates the impact of social issues on the music industry. Through colorful pictures on the plates, the artists tried to rethink historical events, tell about themselves or about the difficulties they had to go through.

The unique exposition covers various periods in the history of music covers, each of which is presented in a separate thematic section. We start from the 50s and 60s, when many designers were just beginning to experiment with the visual design of the covers, and the tradition of designing sleeves for records was just emerging. In the 70s, music covers became a platform for creative exploration and experimentation. In the 80s, new musical groups came, which not only represented a new sound, but also created defiant covers. In the 90s and 2000s, due to the spread of electronic music, designers began to look for new ways to visualize music covers. Nowadays, virtualization and digital technologies have greatly changed the design of covers, and some covers are even created by artificial intelligence.

The viewer will be able to track the evolution of the design of music albums along with such legendary heroes as the “King of Rock and Roll” Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Frank Sinatra, the “Liverpool Four” The Beatles, The Who and the Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd, Beck and Gorillaz, rock’s main “chameleon” David Bowie, Nirvana and Hole, and “the voice of the 1960s generation” and Nobel laureate in literature Bob Dylan.

The exhibition project uses interactive installations that will recreate the atmosphere of the most iconic covers and immerse viewers in the world of music. Maybe you have always dreamed of sitting at the drum kit, trying on an electric guitar? Or feel yourself in the place of one of the legendary “Liverpool Four”, being at that very crossing? All this can be done at the exhibition. If you want, even “penetrate” the famous cover of The Velvet Underground, created by Andy Warhol. On it, the artist, in the best traditions of pop art, placed a banana, taking it from an existing advertising image.

So, through modern art installations and archival materials, studying the evolution of music covers, together with cult heroes and their music, the viewer will trace the evolution of the style of music albums. One of the main objectives of the exhibition is to restore the balance between the musical and visual components and return to their rightful place the designers and artists who made the most important contribution to both the music industry and the culture of their era, the organizers say.

Mikhail Kovalyov.

Author’s photo