Museum Diaghilev Museum of Contemporary Art

Diaghilev Museum of Contemporary Art

The Museum was established in 2008. The collection comprises more than 300 pieces of contemporary art: paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs.

The core of the collection are the pieces by the representatives of the Leningrad independent art of 1960-1980s. Prominent among them are: Aleksandr Baturin, a member of ‘Old Peterhof school of art’ who went through the Stalin concentration camps; and representatives of the school of Osip Sidlin – Anatoly Basin and Natalia Toreeva, Vladimir Ovchinnikov and Anatoli Vasiliev who in 1964 participated in a notorious exhibition of the artists-workers of the Hermitage. Also, it is worth mentioning the names of Gleb Bogomolov, Anatoly Belkin, Valentin Gerasimenko and Nikolay Sazhin, who took part in the first large exhibitions of nonconformists in 1974–1975 in the House of Culture named after Gas and House of Culture ‘Nevsky’.

Also, in the collection of the Museum there are works of the members of the Association for Experimental Fine Arts, created in 1981. Neo-expressionism and the art of the young graffiti artists is presented by Ivan Sotnikov, a member of the group ‘New Artists’; the new religious painting is presented by a member of the group ‘Alipii’, the artist Vik (Vyacheslav Zabelin). Traditions of the painting of St Petersburg are presented in the Museum collection by the names of such famous masters as Felix Volosenkov, Vyacheslav Mikhailov, Valery Lukka, Zaven Arshakuni, and Ivan Uralov.

The collection of the Museum includes graphic works in various techniques by Georgy Kovenchuk, Evgeny Ukhnalev, Igor Tiulpanov, Valerii Mishin, and other prominent artists.

There is a department of applied art where it is necessary to mention the porcelain artist Leonid Sokolov. Also, in the collection there are sculptures by Konstantin Simun, Galina Dodonova and Levon Lazarev.

It is impossible to imagine the Museum of Modern Art without the works of the young artists who have already become widely famous both in Russia and abroad: Ilya Gaponov, Marina Koldobskaya, Aleksei Iarygin, Tatiana Gubareva, Marina and Aleksandra Fedorovs, and others.

The collection of foreign modern art comprises works of masters from Italy, Holland, Estonia, the USA, Poland and other countries. All of the works of this department of the Museum were gifts from the artists.