Moscow’s Garage Museum Halts Work on Exhibitions Due to War in Ukraine

Moscow art organizations and artists continue to respond to the war in Ukraine. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art today revealed that it would “stop work on all exhibits till the human and political catastrophe that is unfolding in Ukraine has stopped,” according to declaration emailed to press. And popular Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has closed his exhibit at another Moscow museum, GES-2, early.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, in Moscow’s Gorky Park, had upcoming exhibits by Lydia Masterkova, Anne Imhof, Helen Marten, and Saodat Ismailova prepared. The museum’s declaration, which likewise appears on the its site, suggests that the organization will  satisfy its “obligations to the artists whose tasks are being delayed and who have worked with us with trust and interest.” The Masterkova exhibit was slated to open on March 16, and the Imhof program, the veryfirst in Russia for the commemorated artist who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, was due to open on April 5.

Kjartansson‘s exhibit, Santa Barbara – A Living Sculpture, inaugurated the V-A-C Foundation’s brand-new GES-2 House of Culture in December and was indicated to run through March13 “It is not possible to have this work when this scary starts,” Kjartansson told the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service – Ríkisútvarpið, calling Russia a “fascist state.”

The Garage was established in 2008 by popular modern art collector Dasha Zhukova and her then-partner Roman Abramovich, likewise a collector. The museum has consideringthat broadened from a website in a previous bus garage to a Rem Koolhaas–designed structure in Gorky Park. The V-A-C Foundation was established in 2009 by collector Leonid Mikhelson.