Russia recently became the proud mom of a brand new art museum. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is the first new contemporary art museum to open in the country since the collapse of the USSR. Located in Moscow’s Gorky Park, the museum occupies the building of a former Soviet-era mega-restaurant. The building is especially close to the heart of Rem Koolhaas, whose first trip to Russia in the 60’s exposed him to Soviet architecture and inspired him to become an architect. Some of the original design features were kept, including a mural-sized Soviet mosaic piece.
Kate Fowle, Garage’s chief curator since 2013, has selected exhibitions by Yayoi Kusama, George Kiesewalter, and Rirkrit Tiravanija to debut the new space. She also commissioned a sculpture by Rashid Johnson which has found a home in Garage’s atrium. Though Garage’s scope is international, according to Fowle it seeks to “enable an eco-system for contemporary art and artists and curators to develop in Moscow.”.
In addition to heavy hitting names in art, the museum features an exhibit curated by The Garage Teens Team, an awesome annual program for high-schoolers that utilizes contemporary art theory and museum practice to produce an original exhibit. This year’s installation, The Sixties: Points of Intersection, focuses on the generation when the building’s original tenant, the Vremena Goda restaurant, was a fashionable destination.
The city’s newest pride and joy is the project of Dasha Zhukova, a big-time art collector and the daughter and wife of Russian oligarchs, who founded the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in 2008.
Want to see more? Watch their opening video below:
