Moscow’s Contemporary Art Movement

Despite decades of Soviet-era isolation and today’s economic and political tensions, Moscow is positioning itself as a center for cutting-edge art

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There’s no Russian expression for “contemporary art”—the closest is “modern”—but that hasn’t stopped Moscow’s bold campaign to become the world’s next contemporary-art hub.

Despite decades of Soviet-era isolation and today’s economic and political tensions, Moscow is positioning itself as a center for cutting-edge art, with a high-profile, contemporary art museum opening its new home in Gorky Park next week and a series of buzzy events around the city. These include the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art—known for discovering Eastern European stars—and the Cosmoscow art fair, both opening in September.

New directors are shaking up the fusty Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Tretyakov State Gallery by organizing shows of international artists like U.S. sculptor Alexander Calder. Artist-run spaces are popping up around the city—from a converted winery called the Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art to art studios in a former Elektrozavod power plant. These shows typically draw young collectors, not masterpiece-buying oligarchs.

Moscow has flirted with art-world prominence before, notably in the mid-’80s whenglasnost attracted international curators. The wave peaked in 1988, when Sotheby’s held a $3.6 million Russian art auction in the city. But a host of factors—from the dearth of English-speaking local artists to the tempting expatriate community already thriving in London—kept the scene from taking off. The recent recession and volatile ruble didn’t help, either.

Moscow’s market is still lagging behind New York, London and Hong Kong—hampered by fighting in Ukraine and international sanctions that discourage some major dealers from shopping million-dollar works there.

Yet new tastemakers are doubling down on Moscow, determined to make Russia a must-see instead of a flyover state on the way to China and other countries in the East that have blossomed in recent years.

Vasili Tsereteli, director of the 15-year-old Moscow Museum of Modern Art, said local collectors and artists are steering the current revival, not curious outsiders. Annual attendance at the museum has doubled to 400,000 people in the past four years, he said, and most are Russian speakers. “We’re witnessing a tremendous shift in interest for contemporary art,” Mr. Tsereteli said.

Local dealers and collectors say their efforts will be judged primarily by the fate of a single museum, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Next Friday , Dasha Zhukova, the philanthropist wife of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, will reopen her museum—named after its original bus-garage location—in a 58,000-square-foot space in Gorky Park, a 300-acre public park near the city center. Ms. Zhukova hired Dutch architectRem Koolhaas to transform a former 1960s pavilion and restaurant called the Seasons of the Year into a space dominated by a pair of 33-foot-wide, translucent panels that can slide several stories up, exposing a vast atrium.

Behind Mr. Koolhaas’s polycarbonate plastic sheath, traces of the space’s former life abound—from a mural of a redheaded woman portraying the season of autumn to brick walls that were covered in graffiti after the abandoned pavilion fell into post-Soviet disrepair. The effect is intended to be a cozy departure from the pristine, white-cube atmosphere popularized by many other galleries and museums.

Ms. Zhukova said she was pleased Mr. Koolhaas wanted to preserve some of the pavilion’s Soviet past because the core of her museum is an historical archive. Born in Moscow and educated in California, Ms. Zhukova said she has focused recently on rediscovering her home city’s story, artistically. Since most state museums stopped collecting avant-garde art during the Soviet era, she has spent the past few years “on a scavenger hunt,” namely buying documents that chronicle Russia’s underground art scene from the 1950s toglasnost and beyond. Under the Soviets, artists who painted in a photorealistic style were revered but other art movements—from pop to conceptualism to performance—were deemed inferior. Wry, conceptual painters like Ilya Kabakov had no choice but to exhibit in friends’ apartments or move abroad.

Archivists from the Garage are rounding up essays, fliers and photographs from those underground art events. “After so many years of isolation, we’re still working out our Russian identities,” Ms. Zhukova said. Amassing an archive of Russian art “helps connect a few more dots.”

Many of the findings will go on view during the inaugural show, including artist Anton Vidokle’s research into cosmism, a utopian philosophy that inspired Mr. Kabakov and others. (Cosmonaut is a spinoff term.) The museum is also hanging a vast, family-tree-style graphic that will chart the rise and influence of several generations of overlooked Russian artists from the 1950s on.

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