Swiss exhibition puts Soviet sport in the spotlight

An exhibition of Russian sport during the Soviet Union is on display at the Olympic Museum in Switzerland’s lakeside city of Lausanne. Exploring sport during the 1920s and 1930s, Russian Avant-Garde and Sport features photos, books, posters and film extracts, with photography from Constructivist artists including Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova and Gustav Klucis.

With photography and graphic design at the heart of the exhibition, Russian Avant-Garde and Sport features some big names in the European photography scene, with work from Hungarian painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, German photographer Gerhard Riebicke and Austrian sportsman-turned-photographer Lothar Rübelt.

Alongside Klucis’s famous photomontages, the exhibition’s pièce de résistance is a selection of photos taken at the Moscow Spartakiad of 1928, a sometime socialist rival to the Olympic games.

Russian Avant-Garde and Sport is part of the Olympic Museum’s Sochi 2014 programme and will run until 18 May.