Garage Museum will show its own collection in open storage for the first time this autumn

For the first time in its entire history, the Garage Museum will acquire a collection of its own and a permanent display; more precisely, the collection will be shown as open storage in the museum's main building, the Four Seasons pavilion. The first works acquired by the museum will be shown as early as this autumn, in a project titled "Open Storage. Prologue".

How many years ago was it now that I met Anton Belov, the director of Garage, and learnt that the museum had no collection of art of its own? It greatly surprised me. How could that be: a museum without a collection? In truth, of course, Garage has long been a collector, but until now it was only an archive relating to the history of contemporary art, one of the largest of its kind, incidentally.

And now, at last, the museum's doors will be opened once more to the showing of art, and where before we waited only for new exhibitions, there will now be a permanent display as well.

Some of the works will come from the museum's archive. Naturally, the artists' archives held at Garage contain a great many sketches, objects that defy unambiguous classification, and photo and video documentation. Some of these items will be moved into open storage and will exchange an archival context for an artistic one.

Among the artists already named whose works will appear in the permanent collection are the Agency of Singular Investigations, Nikita Alekseev, Misha Le Zhen, Kirill Glushchenko, Mikhail Maksimov and Andrey Monastyrsky.

Excellent news! My congratulations to the museum's staff! I can hardly wait to go to Garage again as though to work.

In the photographs: a fragment of the video documentation of the action "Fountain" at the Saratov river port, Misha Le Zhen, 2003; "Transport. Aesthetic Overlay", Andrey Monastyrsky, 1985; a still from the video "Lights of Moscow", Kirill Glushchenko, 2020; a snapshot of the interactive media installation "Flyover OS. Archive of Transgressions", Mikhail Maksimov, 2020; "Flower Power. Archive. Psychohistorical Visions", Agency of Singular Investigations, 2018; an untitled drawing by Nikita Alekseev, 1983.