Moscow Museum of Modern Art

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The Moscow Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum at Petrovka in Moscow, Russia that opened in December 1999.

The project was initiated and executed by Zurab Tsereteli, president of the Russian Academy of Arts, whose private collection constituted the core of the Museum’s assemblage. The Museum of Modern Art is located in Gubin’s mansion, an architectural monument of the 18th century, designed by noted the Russian architect Matvey Kazakov.

In the Museum, artworks of many foreign renowned artists are exhibited; in particular, collections of objects and sculpture by Armand, and the “Sun Disk” by the famous Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. Among foreign experimental forms of particular interest are the installation “CIS Ant Farm” by the Japanese conceptualist Yukinory Yanagi, as well as other works of contemporary art based on contemporary technologies. The masters of European and American art, such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Rufino Tamayo, are represented by their lithographs.

A special emphasis has been given to the collection of Russian avant-garde art. The museum spotlights works of world-famous artists of the turn of the 20th century: Kazimir Malevich, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Robert Falk, Ivan Pouni, Vladimir Baranov-Rossine and David Burlyuk (30 pieces). Visitors can also become acquainted with two compositions by Kandinsky’s friend Vladimir Izdebski, who is known for his “Salons de Paris” series after the revolution of 1917, and also a unique collection by the famous Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani.

The Museum displays the interesting exposition dedicated to the art of non-conformists of the 1950–70s, whose creative activity was in the opposition to the Soviet ideology. Among them are V. Nemukhin, E. Steinberg, V. Komar, A. Melamid, O. Rabin, A. Zverev, D. Krasnopevtsev, and more.

Contemporaries are represented by Boris Orlov, Dmitry Prigov, Francisco Infante, Oleg Kulik, A. Brodski, Aidan Salakhov, Lena Hades, Valery Koshlyakov and Serguei Shutov. They are mostly focused on forms of the so called “actual” art.

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art contains works of art from the first decades of the 20th century; the exposition is based on contrasts and correlations of artistic trends and events in Russia and abroad, and is also aimed at showing the integrity of the development of world culture, while specifying the role of the Russian art in it.

In December of 2003, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art expanded its galleries to a second address — the exhibition hall in the Ermolayevskii Pereulok, also a historic building in Moscow's city center. The spacious halls of this center allow us to exhibit very sizable art projects. One of the first of such projects became "Artconstitution," in which nearly one hundred contemporary Russian artists took part. As a result of the ensuing wave of public interest, numerous international exhibitions followed. One of these exhibitions was a display sponsored by FotoFest (Houston, U.S.A), featuring 260 photographic masterpieces by 24 authors from the USA, and 12 other countries of Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Today the Museum is renowned not only for its collections and exhibits, but it is also known as a center of artistic education. The School of Modern Art (by the name of "Free Studios") works alongside the Museum, featuring a two-year program which is realized in concrete practice in creative studiowork. Included in the program are lectures on modern art, the study of contemporary visual art technologies, mastery of a broad spectrum of intellectual problems surrounding contemporary culture, and familiarization with today's art market.

Nearest Metro: Pushkinskaya