Contemporary Art Department: Recent Acquisitions

The exhibits on show were just some of the works that have recently been acquired by the museum. The Contemporary Art Department has been shown here only a small aspect of its on-going collecting process. The department existed in the museum for just over a decade now. It was created in order to collect and exhibit in the Russian Museum such new and non-traditional forms of art as installations, assemblages, video art, photography, photo-based art and much more, phenomena that are now in the mainstream of modern art, shown in a multinational context.
The curators of the Contemporary Art Department are inspired by the historical precedent set by Nikolai Punin back in the 1920s. In the second half of the 1920s, Punin headed the department of the same name at the Russian Museum. The object of its attention was art in all its experimental and radical forms. Today, no state of affairs -- be it politics, group loyalties or arbitrary factors -- is sufficient reason to not pay attention to the leading phenomena of modern art.

The department's collecting activities is closely connected to its exhibition work. As a rule, its collection is augmented by works included in museum exhibitions. This museum exhibition thus confirms a work's status, which is then reaffirmed by its acquisition for the museum collection.

The department's main task is to follow the art process and reflect this process in the museum collection, filling in any gaps that might have occurred. The department pays particular attention to phenomena that, for various reasons (usually political), were not previously collected. These works appeared long before the department was formed.

Among such works are the creations of the representatives of the Moscow underground and art of the 1970s and 1980s. They are represented by such movements as Moscow pop-art, conceptualism, soc-art, geometric abstraction, the Petersburg New Artists and Necro-Realism. The exhibition included the works of Leonid Borisov, Sergey Bugaev (Africa), Victoria Buyvid, Ira Valdron, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Timur Novikov, Vadim Ovchinnikov, Boris Savelyev and Marilyn Spindler.