The research aims to assess the effectiveness and determine the specificity of using the method of visualisation of musical images in order to develop expressive performance skills in future pianists. The paper summarises the practice of students’ academic and creative work on С. Debussy’s preludes, during which visual associations helped pianists find the necessary touch, identify the nature of key touch and the peculiarities of performing technique, and also examines the experience of using the image visualisation method in the course of studying modern repertoire, in particular G. Ligeti’s sonor music. The work provides specific examples of undertaking analytical consideration of musical expression means in the impressionist composer’s preludes and the avant-gardist’s études, searching for and finding visual associations that help students understand the avant-garde language and form their own performing approach. The paper is novel in that it analyses the process of applying the visualisation method when working with piano students on the consideration of impressionist and avant-garde pieces and proves the effectiveness of this method in the process of piano students training, including training on the basis of modern repertoire. What is new in the work is the analysis of musical expression means from the standpoint of the concept of artistic image and interpretation style, as well as the matching of visual associations to specific images of the above-mentioned composers’ preludes and études. The research findings are as follows: analogies between the elements of musical pieces and specific objects and phenomena that helped piano students determine the nature of images, find the appropriate performing strokes and expressive techniques have been identified; in the course of an experiment a high level of expressive performance skills development has been achieved among students in working with whom the image visualisation method has been used.