Published on: 2026-09-05
Source: Moscow Government – Правительства Москвы –
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A unique exhibition “Russian Museum in ‘ZILART’. Masterpieces of art of the second half of the 20th century. Gift of Peter and Irene Ludwig” has opened at the ZILART Museum. The opening was attended by the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Olga Lyubimova, and the Minister of the Moscow Government, head of the city’s Department of Culture Alexey Fursin, CEO of the Russian Museum Alla Manilova.
“The opening of the exhibition of masterpieces of Russian art from the second half of the 20th century is part of Moscow’s extensive work on developing inter-museum cooperation with leading exhibition halls and foundations in Russia and worldwide. In 2025, for the first time in history, the Russian Museum brought more than 100 masterpieces from its collection to our city, and this year we also plan to open several major projects, including international ones, dedicated to unique works of art and rare exhibits from Russian and foreign collections. The exhibition opening today is a vivid example of such a project and a wonderful gift to Muscovites for City Day,” noted Alexey Fursin.
The exhibition features more than 100 works of art from the collection of the State Russian Museum. They cover a wide range of artistic styles: American pop art and hyperrealism, German neo-expressionism and GDR painting, Cuban and Latin American schools, Moscow conceptualism, and figurativism. Among the authors of the works are Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, Werner Tübke, Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, and many others.
Starting from September 5, the exhibition can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 22:00 (entrance until 20:30). It will run for five months — until February 7, 2027.
The idea of the exhibition
The curator of the exhibition is Alexander Borovsky, Head of the Department of Modern Trends at the State Russian Museum and an art consultant for the “ZILART” museum; the architect is Erik Belousov.
The exhibition space is organized so that visitors become witnesses to a dialogue: different artistic directions exist not in isolation but resonate with each other. This is exactly how art lovers and patrons Peter and Irene Ludwig perceived contemporary art while assembling their collection: they were interested not in separate styles, but in the overall picture of the artistic process.
The exhibition route is divided into several thematic blocks. Each of them is dedicated to one of the key artistic strategies of the second half of the 20th century. Together, they demonstrate how the language of art, the concept of the artist, and ways of discussing the contemporary world have evolved.
One of the thematic blocks is pop art. Artists in this direction turned to images from mass culture, advertising, and everyday objects, combining the popular and the elite and turning familiar things into a topic for conversation about art itself and consumer society. Another is hyperrealism, which explores the possibilities of depiction, taking painterly precision to photographic accuracy. Central here are works by Ralph Goings “The Unadilla Diner” and Robert Bechtle “Palm Trees.” In addition, neo-expressionism is represented, which embraces free and spontaneous painting, sharp color contrasts, and expressive deformation of form, as well as abstraction, where instead of depicting the visible world, artists work with color, line, spot, plane, and volume. All the works, selected by experienced collectors, demonstrate the connection of eras and the destinies of people.
ZILART Museum
The museum and exhibition center “ZILART” was opened on December 2, 2025. It is a modern cultural space created on the territory of the reorganized “ZIL” industrial zone on Bratyev Vesninykh Boulevard (house 3) by the founder of the company “LSR Group,” Andrey Molchanov, and his wife Elizaveta. For more than 25 years, they have been collecting their own art collection, which contains over eight thousand items.
The five-story museum building, covering about 13 thousand square meters and designed by Sergey Choban and the architectural bureau “Spich,” is a glass-and-metal cube, as if wrapped in a pattern of trapezoids. The copper facade changes color and texture over time, becoming a symbol of a “living” museum. The building has four levels of exhibition halls, a children’s interactive space, a museum shop, a conference hall, and a restaurant.
The premises can accommodate up to 1,300 visitors at a time. The “ZILART” museum does not have a permanent exhibition. It operates on a repertory principle, allowing the exhibition space to be regularly refreshed with new content.
Currently, on the fourth floor, there is an exhibition “African Art: Gods, Ancestors, Life” (12+), featuring more than a thousand artifacts from the museum’s collection related to the traditional art of the peoples of West and Central Africa. The exhibition’s author is architect Evgeny Ass.
On the fifth floor is Grisha Bruskin’s original project Dies Illa (18+), created specifically for the museum. The installation develops themes and images first shown in the “Change of Scenery” project at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The exhibition’s architect is Igor Chirkin.
The fifth-floor terrace is dedicated to the installation by artist and architect Alexander Brodsky “Shelter of the Innocents” (18+) — a crooked wooden shed, as if grown onto the building façade and having developed its own life; behind the creaky doors and narrow corridors is a small bar. Amid the sound of the surf, one can chat with the bartender and experience the characteristic atmosphere of “lively melancholy” typical of the artist’s works.
A rich educational program is organized in “ZILART,” including lectures, master classes, concerts, theatrical performances, excursions, and much more.
Information about the museum and the event program can be found at website.
Sergey Sobyanin opened the new museum and exhibition center “ZILART”
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