«Realism: Yesterday and Today. Art and Truth» exhibition opened in the branch of the Russian Museum in Malaga in June. It was the first for the museum after the lifting of restrictions against the development of the epidemic.  All artworks (more than 100) were brought to Malaga before the worlds lockdown by staff of The State Russian museum.

Organization of the exhibitionand the opening ceremonywere held online. The director of the Russian Museum Vladimir Gusev and the museum staff, the Russian ambassador to Spain, Yuri Korchagin, took part in it. They were joined by representatives of local authorities and other officials.

The exposition presents visitors with the opportunity to learn more about such a distinctive and very interesting direction in art as Russian Realism. Almost one 190 works created by the masters of the national school of painting in the 18th – 20th centuries tell about how realistic art was born and developed in Russia.

Malaga branch and The State Russian Museum presents the multimedia guide with augmented reality on the base of the application Artefact «Realism: Yesterday and Today. Art and Truth». The application allows you take a walk through the exhibition staying at home (scroll the catalogue) or in real life do a promenade with interesting free multimedia and audio-mobile guide. This is the first experience of cooperation between «Virtual Russian museum» service and  branch in Malaga.

Application users have the great opportunity to get in touch with art – there are a catalogue with additional artworks and accompanying materials in the form of points of interest, annotations and audio guides. The specially selected materials of the museum make the guide an indispensable companion for those who have to get acquainted with the exhibits of the exhibition - small-scale works from the collection of the Russian Museum, information about which can hardly be found on the Internet.

Important names of Russian painting of past eras - Andrey Matveev, Aleksey Venetsianov, KuzmaPetrov-Vodkin, Pyotr Konchalovsky - are presented in the virtual guide along with the works of artists who are our contemporaries today - RinatIsmagilov, Tatiana Nazarenko, Vladimir Lyubarov and others.

The augmented reality application “Artefact” was developed by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for museums in Russia. The Russian Museum was one of the first to start creating virtual guides on the Artefact platform, which can be used both in the application of the same name and on its official website. Today, the museum has 12 virtual guides, each of which is an independent digital project. In the Russian Museum, this area of ​​activity is supervised by the "Virtual Russian Museum" service.