Pushkin Museum XXI

In its new projects, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is aimed to involve classical art into a dialogue with contemporaneity and suggests a new perspective for perception of widely known works. The Museum creates a new area of focus – Pushkin XXI Museum.

Pushkin Museum XXI is a program aimed to demonstrate to the visitors what contemporary art is about and to give an idea of its most prominent representatives, to show the art of modern classics who speak not only a language of pictorial art, graphic and photography, but also a language of a new forms. Video, sound, performance could fit harmoniously into the context of a traditional museum. A new media frequently transitory and ephemeral can impart a new understanding of a classical artworks making them breathe and move, involving them into a dialog with a viewer.

Pushkin Museum XXI is an innovative division of the Museum, where all forms of the contemporary art presentation from painting and sculpture to video art and virtual reality are fully involved into a dialogue.

Pushkin Museum XXI is a "Museum in the Museum". The basis of this current direction is an integration of education, research and exhibition activities, which help to develop the evolution of an artistic image from classic methods to modern technologies.

The collection of Pushkin Museum XXI will be based on the works of Russian and foreign artists participating in the exhibition projects as well as works created specifically for the Museum.

Pushkin Museum XXI projects will be also held at various venues of the future Museum District - renovated and new buildings of the District will be used for temporary exhibitions. In the future, Pushkin Museum XXI will become a separate entity and get its own building.

PROJECTS

For the last four years, the new concept of development of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has been actualizing. It is focused on attraction of a new audience by inclusion of contemporary art into the context of the traditional museum of fine arts.

The various venues of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts host exhibition projects, conferences and lectures on contemporary art.

- At the Main Building of the Museum were displayed such exhibitions as:
- 1) "Rembrandt. A different perspective" Dmitry Gutov, 2015;
  2) "Windtruvian Man" Alexander Ponomarev, 2015;
  3) "Impressions 2.0" – Eve Sussman (USA), Cristina Lucas (Spain), "Provmyza" art group, Alex Verhaest (Belgium), 2015–2016;
  4) "Homage Louis Gallait" Erwin Olaf (Netherlands), 2016;
  5) "Lost Keys" Victor Pivovarov, 2016;
  6) sound installation by Andrey Guryanov, Anton Kuryshev within the framework of the exhibition "Raphael. Poetry of the Image", 2016;
  7) site-specific project "Gaze" by Irina Nakhova, 2016-2017;
  8) solo exhibition by "The history of the self-portrait" Yasumasa Morimura (Japan), 2017 and other projects.
- In May 2016 in the Golitsin's Manor was opened an exhibition «House of Impressions. Classic and Contemporary Media Art», in October was launched a new project «House of Impressions. Wandering with a Troubadour». The projects based on the entwinement of the past and the present and those complicated processes that has been happening in the XXI century. Among the participants of exhibition were Bill Viola (USA), Bruce Nauman (USA), Chantal Akerman (Belgium / France), Irina Nakhova(Russia), André and Michel Décosterd (Switzerland), Gary Hill (USA), Anri Sala (Albania), Julian Rosefeldt (Germany), Vito Acconci (USA) and others.
- 1) Solo exhibition by Recycle Group, 2017;
  2) installation by Cai Guo-Qiang (China - USA), 2017;
  3) solo exhibition by Mat Collishaw (UK), 2017;
  4) site-specific installation by Jenny Holzer (USA), 2018;
  5) site-specific project "AfterImage" by Gary Hill (USA), 2018;
  6) public program "Mythology Of Tomorrow", 2018-2021 (sessions "Anatomy Of Space. Where Does Our Body End?", "Median Anesthesia. Art Between Consciousness and The Rifts Of Reality", "Is A Woman A Goddess Or A Witch?", "From Artemisia Gentileschi To Elena Kovylina", "Invisible: Big Data And Artistic Interventions In The City");
  7) joint with Pushkin Youth Laboratory for the Study of Image Moving, 2019-2020;
  8) solo exhibition by Bill Viola (USA), 2021.

It is expected to display some exhibitions of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts on various venues of Western and Russian museums. Among the prospective venues are Tate Modern (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), The National Museum of the Republic of Bashkortostan (Ufa), Arsenal Exhibition Hall (Nizhny Novgorod), Manege Central Exhibition Hall (Saint Petersburg) and others.

One of the first large external projects of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in the context of contemporary art will be the exhibition "Man as Bird. Images of Journeys" within the Collateral Program of the 57th Venice Biennale. The exhibition is focused on transformation of perception of the world under the lens of art. The art journey turns out to be not just a mere geography but worldview. A new human universe, a new world - visual and non-visual, reverberant and silent are created by means of poetry, sound and rhythm. The exhibition will feature works from the collection of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, private collections, and site-specific installations created specially for the space of the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel.