Moscow Museum of Modern Art is the first state museum in Russia that concentrates its activities exclusively on the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since its inauguration, the Museum has expanded its strategies and achieved a high level of public acknowledgement. Today the Museum is an energetic institution that plays an important part on the Moscow art scene.

    The Museum was unveiled on December 15, 1999; its founding director was Zurab Tsereteli, President of the Russian Academy of Arts. His private collection of more than 2.000 works by important 20th century masters was the core of the Museum's permanent display. Later on, the Museum's keepings were enriched considerably, and now this is one of the largest and most impressive collections of modern and contemporary Russian art, which continues to grow through acquisitions and donations.

    Today the Museum has three venues in the historic centre of Moscow. The main building, which houses the permanent collection and holds temporary exhibitions, is situated in Petrovka Street, in the former 18th-century mansion house of merchant Gubin, designed by the renowned neoclassical architect Matvey Kazakov. Apart from that, the Museum owns two splendid exhibition venues: a vast five-storey building in Ermolaevsky Lane, and a spacious gallery in Tverskoy Boulevard, both fully refurbished for hosting large-scale projects. Every year, the Museum organizes single-artist shows, group exhibitions and conceptual displays by well-known masters as well as by emerging artists or the ones that need to be rediscovered.

    The Museum's permanent collection represents main stages in the development of the 20th-century art, from the classics of the Russian avant-garde to contemporary masters. Among the exhibits one can find works by Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Vladimir Tatlin, Pavel Filonov, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Archipenko, Niko Pirosmani, Ilya Kabakov, Anatoly Zverev, Vladimir Yakovlev, Vladimir Nemukhin, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Oscar Rabin, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Leonid Schwartzman, Oleg Tselkov, Boris Orlov, Dmitry A. Prigov, Valery Koshlyakov, Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, Oleg Kulik, Viktor Pivovarov, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Andrey Bartenev, and many others. The holdings also include pieces by well-known Western masters, such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand L?ger, Joan Mir?, Giorgio De Chirico, Salvador Dal?, Henri Rousseau, Arnaldo Pomodoro, and others.

    One of the Museum's priorities is to promote young and emerging artists, bringing them into contemporary artistic process via the activities of the "Independent Workshops" School of Contemporary Art. Apart from that, the Museum engages in research and conservation work, publishes books and "DI" (Dialog Iskusstv / Dialogue of Arts) magazine.

    The Museum is always open to new initiatives and ready for collaboration