Dasha’s Smasher

July 10, 2015 / by Ben Windsor

Above image: Garage Museum in Gorky Park, Vestibule

The opening of Moscow’s striking new Rem Koolhaas-designed Garage Museum of Contemporary Art last month was a decisive moment for Russia’s global cultural ambitions. 

Founders Roman Abramovich and his wife Dasha Zhukova, along with director Anton Belov, and chief curator Kate Fowle, hosted over 500 international guests from the fields of art, entertainment and business, and representatives from many of the most prestigious global institutions.

Top American dealers Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner and Jeffrey Deitch all travelled to Moscow, as did Shanghai-based Xin Li, deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia. The museum’s patrons also include Hong Kong’s Silas Chou and Sir David Tang. 

Zhukova has grand plans for Garage, which she regards as a place for people, art and ideas to create history. “When I came up with the idea to create an art institution in Moscow, I could never have imagined that Garage would become what it is today,” she said at the opening. 

Founded in 2008 by businesswoman and gallerist, Zhukova, Garage is the first philanthropic institution in Russia to create a public mandate for contemporary art and culture. Originally housed in Moscow’s renowned Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, designed by architect Konstantin Melnikov, from which the gallery took its name, in 2012 Garage relocated to a specially commissioned temporary pavilion in Gorky Park designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. 

The new structure, designed by Pritzker-prize winning architect Rem Koolhaas and his OMA studio, has transformed the park’s famous Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) restaurant created in 1968, into an imposing, sci-fi art space. The building had been derelict for 20 years before Zhukova bought it. In this part-preservation project, some original Soviet mosaics were retained and decorative tiles and brickwork were also restored. 

The 5,400 square-metre structure features a state-of-the-art façade of a translucent double-layer of polycarbonate elevated two metres above ground that wraps around the retained concrete structure of the restaurant. 

There is a ground floor space that opens onto the surrounding park and two 11-metre wide vertical sliding panels that rise seven metres above the rooftop terrace when fully extended. 

There are five exhibition galleries, an auditorium, public library, children’s area, and bookshop - Garage’s much-patronized café has also been retained.

Koolhaas was excited by such a prestigious challenge: “Preservation is increasingly important in our approach to existing cities, so we were delighted to work on turning the virtual-ruin of Vremena Goda into the new home for Garage. 

We were able to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the Soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them; it also enabled us to avoid the exaggeration of standards and scale that is becoming an aspect of contemporary art spaces,” he says. Zhukova is similarly enthused: “I am certain that our collaboration will help us create a new vision for contemporary art in Russia.

It is quite a vision, too. Garage will have Russia’s first public library devoted to modern and contemporary art, including “unofficial” art from the Soviet era, providing a glimpse into the country’s alternative art history. There will also be an archive of documentary material relating to the development of contemporary art in Moscow, St Petersburg and other Russian cities since the ’50s. Several commercial galleries across the country have donated their archives.

If Garage is to succeed, it must function as a two-way street. While, as the first such contemporary museum in the city, it must focus on bringing international contemporary art to Moscow, it also has to “produce internationally important projects from Moscow,” says curator Kate Fowle. 

The exhibition programme is testament to Zhukova, and the country’s ambitions; interactive shows by Japan’s
Yayoi Kusama and Argentina’s
Rirkit Tiravanija with Slovakia’s
Julius Koller; a series of displays from the Garage Archive Collection, photographs of the Moscow underground art scene from the ’70s through ’80s by conceptualist George Kiesewalter of Moscow, and works by Taryn Simon from the US, as well as a site-specific installation by Germany’s Katharina Grosse, among a host of other offerings. 

Kusama, the world’s most expensive female artist at auction, is making her debut in Russia, immersing audiences in her sensory and psychological environments. Connecting Garage to the place, she has created a large-scale public artwork, Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees, to guide visitors through Gorky Park.