Moscow’s Red Square showing Russian contemporary art for 1st time

For the first time, Moscow's most famous department store – GUM on Red Square – is showing works by Russia's most prominent and best-selling contemporary artists.

15 mini pavilions are each exhibiting big names including Pavel Pepperstein, Andrey Bartenev, Irina Korina, Oleg Kulik, Aidan Salakhova, the AES+F group, and more.

Part of the artworks have been created exclusively for the “GUM-Red-Line” project and are up for sale.

The exhibition runs until the end of May on the ground floor of the capital’s main mall. The organizers expect about 3.2 million people to visitors – to put this into perspective, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art and Moscow’s Kremlin Museums welcome around 900,000 and 2.9 million people a year respectively.

GUM’s permanent Red Line gallery is also now open on the mall’s third floor. Group and solo exhibitions by the same contemporary artists are in the pipeline.

“When we started working on this space, I realized that in the late 19th century there was a gallery belonging to the art collector and merchant Henry Brocard in exactly the same place. It’s amazing,” Project Director Igor Kazakov told Russia Beyond.