Is it possible to combine contemporary art and a business center and create an exhibition space of 2,000 square meters outside of institutional institutions? The answer to this question will be given by the owner of Nikolskaya Gallery Irina Nikolskaya, who created the POP UP MUSEUM project in cooperation with the NEO GEO business center on Kaluzhskaya. Irina is the founder and ideologist of the project, has a higher education in economics, marketing and PR, art management and gallery business; graduate of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo.


POP UP MUSEUM is a mobile museum of contemporary Russian art with a variable exposition. The main concept of the museum is the development of the cultural environment outside the Garden Ring, and its mission is to popularize Russian art. Wide range of directions: creating a collection of works for the project, Irina Nikolskaya selected artists working in completely different techniques and genres. The emergence of new cultural institutions, according to Nikolskaya, helps each person to improve and develops society as a whole.


The idea was born when the desire to show art and talk about it became more accessible than the number of square meters in Nikolskaya Gallery. It was impossible to fill all the halls of the business center instantly, so at first Nikolskaya showed her own collection of Russian artists, and only then began contracts with artists throughout the country. Among the first among the already known names were Vasil Hannanov and Alexey Orlovsky, as well as the contemporary Russian photographer Artem Shchedrov. Developing rapidly, within six months after the start, the project participated in the International Biennale "Russian-Chinese Seasons - 2018", and a little later - in the Moscow International Biennale, becoming a satellite platform with the exhibition project "Noise" by artist Nastya Miro.


The museum celebrated the beginning of 2018 and the launch of a full-fledged work with the exhibition “Abstraction. Return to the Future "within the framework of the III International Festival" Abstraction without Borders ". With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Creative Workshop of the Volga Branch of the Russian Academy of Arts, as well as the Creative Union of Artists of Russia, an exhibition was held, in which 29 abstract artists from 27 countries took part. The exhibition at POP UP MUSEUM was opened by the ideologist of the Abstraction Without Borders festival, a modern classic of Russian abstract painting, David Ru. At the moment of opening, a performance was presented right within the walls of the museum with the creation of a large-scale abstract work and electroacoustic improvisation.


In the spring of the same year, POP UP MUSEUM opened the Dreams of the Earth and The Road Home exhibitions with works provided from the collection of a Moscow collector and patron of art, founder of the Foundation for the Support of Arts and Museum Activities, Yulia Verbitskaya. Participants of the “Dreams of the Earth” vernissage are eight winners of the “Russian Brush” art competition organized by the Verbitskaya Foundation. The jury of the competition was noted by professional experts - Deputy Director of the State Museum of Oriental Art Tatyana Metaksa, Director of the Serpukhov Museum of History and Art Lyudmila Gafurova, Dean of the Faculty of Arts of Moscow State University Alexander Lobodanov, as well as Yulia Verbitskaya herself.

The exposition of the pair exhibition "The Way Home" includes two painters who are completely different in their worldview - Alexei Besperstov and Vladimir Glukhov, a teacher and student, whose lives and work are inextricably linked with Russia and Central Asia. The concept of the exhibition reflected the ideas of the philosophy of Sufism about the life path that each person has to go from cradle to death, as well as about the inevitable return home, to the origins of his work, which is often the main, deep plot of Persian and Arabic poetry.

The avant-garde positions of poster art were discussed at the exhibition of the Association of Poster Artists "Color of Space", which also opened in the spring at POP UP MUSEUM, timed to coincide with the Cosmonautics Day. NI Baburina, an art critic and honored worker of culture of the Russian Federation, wrote: “Moscow poster artists have always been the leaders of the most important social and artistic processes. It is difficult to overestimate their role in the public life of the state, in political campaigns and actions. They were no less active in the artistic and cultural life of the country, in organizing exhibitions, participating in competitions, parades and, of course, in creative work. ... The Moscow school has always exerted a powerful influence on the agitational art of the republics also because its leading masters taught and teach at art institutes and colleges, pass on the best traditions of their art to the younger generation. "

Irina Nikolskaya's project often seeks to create an exhibition highlighting the importance of a particular day in Russian history. Such an exhibition was the personal exhibition of the young artist Sasha Sokolova "364 days" dedicated to the Victory Day, designed to draw public attention to the life of veterans in those 364 days when everyone's attention was not riveted to them. Sasha Sokolova, describing the project, said: “It was important for me to capture these people, namely their ordinary life, because the future generation will never know our heroes personally. The oldest female veteran I wrote was 100 years old and, unfortunately, she passed away in January 2018 at 101 years old. I highlighted her portrait, covering it with a layer of white paint, as a reminder that soon there will be no others. Thus, my project will change over time. Visually, the images of these people will fade on my canvases, but I hope that the feat that they have done for us will never fade in the memory of future generations. "


The exposition included a series of portraits of men and women selected from the surviving group of veterans, in total 9 veterans took part in the project. Sasha met each one personally. Each person was presented in 5 canvases - oil paintings created from sketches and photographs: the first canvas is the eyes of the participants, the second is the hands, and the third is black and white images of each person's memories of the war.

One of the brightest events of the first year of the existence of POP UP MUSEUM was the personal exhibition "Water World" by the Russian artist of international level Ekaterina Vorona. Her works are in the collections of the State Russian Museum, the State Historical Museum, the Russian Cultural Fund, the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War, Kensington Palace (London, Great Britain) and other state Russian and foreign museums, as well as in many private and corporate collections in Russia, countries Europe, the USA, China. Vorona became the first Russian artist whose work was added to the collection of contemporary art at the Vatican Museum.

At the exhibition "Water World", dedicated to poetry and the symbolism of water, magnificent impressionist canvases with an area of ​​up to 2.5 square meters. filled the space of the most spacious atrium of the NEO GEO business center. Russian art critic, curator, head of the Department of Newest Trends of the State Russian Museum Alexander Borovsky about Ekaterina Voron: “There is an inner life in Ekaterina's painting. It is important for her to show the process of the formation of foam, whirlpools, sea vapors, and we are not talking about scientific fixation. ... This is the striving of forms in depth and from depth to the surface, as they acquire a metaphorical dimension. … These works undoubtedly contain a modern version of the Symbolist attitude. Grigory Sternin, speaking of symbolism, warned against attempts at direct deciphering and decoding: "mirage is the illusion of life itself," "symbolism is a doubled world." Regarding Catherine's works: you shouldn't look here for detailed literary analogs, ekphrasis. It is enough to state that there is a symbolist glass in the artist's optics - the concrete “grows” with myth and poetry, and vice versa. Hence - the suggestion of the images of Catherine Vorona. Their mesmerizing effect on the audience. "

The exhibition "Russian-Chinese Seasons 2018" together with the SYART Foundation defined a new stage in the existence of the project. This large-scale event dedicated to cultural exchange, art and innovation of the two countries brought together artists and gallery owners and allowed many viewers to get acquainted with contemporary Chinese and Russian art in a large-scale format for the first time.

About 100 Russian and Chinese authors took part in the project. The exposition included outstanding examples of international contemporary art, including painting, graphics, sculpture, performance, digital art, immersive performance and video art.

At the end of 2018, there were more and more young authors among the project participants. A new discovery was the personal mini-exhibition of the artist Tina Abrahamyan, who works with author's painting and sculpture. In the expressive and sometimes surreal works of Tina, her inner world finds expression, which goes far beyond the boundaries of permissible experiments with the exterior. The Club kids exhibition was inspired by New York's famous club kids movement. The movement began in the late 1980s, initiated by Michael Elig and James St. James, who later became known as the club kings of New York. Glory to the participants of the movement was brought by the defiant style of clothing and the ability to create a party out of nothing at lightning speed. Outrageous, sometimes futuristic images, combining bright costumes and shocking makeup with relaxed behavior, very quickly struck the public and had a huge impact on the art and the fashion industry.

In 2019, the POP UP MUSEUM project expanded its boundaries and began to cooperate with public spaces, including outside the business center. The first partners were the Moscow restaurants “Sapiens” on Lubyanka and “Zharovnya” on Belorusskaya. In accordance with the design of the premises for the exposition, abstract works by Ekaterina Solovieva and Igor Sever with selected works from Solovieva's exhibition “Galaxy Inside” and Sever's “Foucault. Deleuze. Abstractions ". In the summer, these public spaces were joined by the ALT HOUSE SPA, located on the territory of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, where the entire personal exhibition of Viktoria Aksenova “Floral myth” was placed.


Victoria Aksenova is a member of the Union of Artists of Russia and the International Association of Fine Arts AIAP UNESCO. She is a popular contemporary artist whose paintings are characterized by freshness, ease of perception and positive energy. In particular, the context of the Floral Myth exhibition was directly related to energy: the project explored the mysterious influence of flora on humans and their subtle connection with them. The series of works was conceived as an opportunity for the viewer to experience the penetration of the energy of color and form into the subconscious through recognizable symbols - colors. For the Floral Myth exposition, the spa became an experimental space. According to the artist's idea, the natural relaxation caused by the energy of plants, even through the prism of colors on the canvas, should increase the impact on the viewer thanks to the space, which is equipped for relaxation with artificial - created by human hands.


An important discovery for the sculpture hall in POP UP MUSEUM was the exhibition of Kirill and Marina Rakhmatullin "Go LesHom", which lasted until the end of the year in the museum. The intriguing title of the exhibition included the transformation of the well-known marginal expression “go the forest” into an impulse to move towards the sacred, where “Omm” at the end is the sound of power, the most famous mantra in the world.


In many cultures, the forest is a generalized symbol of the natural world, a metaphor for life and danger, primarily the danger of various metamorphoses and death. Any metaphysical road either begins in the forest, or sooner or later leads there so that the hero can comprehend what is happening to him, overcome personal chaos, and go out into the world as another, reborn, or, on the contrary, get lost and become a part of the landscape. In their project, the sculptors considered nature and man as accomplices in a single action, reviving and deadening. Each series, as well as individual works, was devoted to archetypal images, revealing the sphere of the borderline between the visible world of physical phenomena and the invisible sphere of the metaphysical.


The spectacular end of the 2019 exhibition season at POP UP MUSEUM was the grandiose exhibition of the artist EVA "Rus", located on 1200 square meters of the museum and presenting more than 120 objects of art from painting and graphics to video art and sculpture. The Rus project examines a person, his spiritual world in the circumstances of the XXI century. Using the technique of detachment, EVA turns everyday things and phenomena associated with human experience into mysterious and mysterious, creating its own spiritual hero.

The beginning of the new decade, the museum took a course on international projects, the first of which was "The Epiphany of Wenut" by artist Katya Kan from Great Britain.

The exhibition entitled "The Epiphany of Wenut" ("Renaissance of the Venets") is dedicated to the mysterious and majestic Ancient Egypt - in particular, its culture of traditionally zoomorphic images of gods and goddesses. Katya Kan uses the image of a woman with the head of a hare in her art, reviving the forgotten cult of the goddess Venet, patroness of the Vienna region in Upper Egypt, rethinking it in the context of modernity.

At different times POP UP MUSEUM one could see the works of avant-garde artists Valery Chtak, Leonid Borisov, Boris Stuchebryukov, abstract artists David Ru and Ekaterina Solovyova, Alexander Boguslavsky, sculptures WELD QUEEN and Tina Abrahamyan, Marina and Kirill Rakhmatullin and Rovshan Rzayev, a group of artists , figurative painting of the Glazier-Finogenov dynasty, Kanushkin, Casus Roma, Elena Yamlikhanova, Masha Yankovskaya - more than 800 artists and creative groups in total.

During the existence of the project since December 2017, more than 70 exhibitions have been implemented in its space, not counting the main exposition, which changes every four months. The frequent change of the museum's exposition obliges the team to constantly replenish the collection and, as a result, present a professional and large-scale cut of contemporary art.

Started as a pop-up project for a year, the museum has extended its collaboration with NEO GEO until 2025. “We see that the POP UP MUSEUM project has created a unique“ art component ”inside our business center, which has turned it into a cultural dominant,” - Anastasia Malkova, Managing Partner of Stone Hedge De luxe

For three years Irina Nikolskaya managed to create a new cultural center of attraction in the South-West of Moscow. The project won the SKOLKOVO ALUMNI AWARDS in the Social Business of the Year 2019 nomination at the Skolkovo School of Management. Ahead are new Russian and international projects, collaborations with democratic public spaces, in which contemporary art will be available to a wide audience. Nikolskaya sees her tasks in the POP UP MUSEUM project in creating alternative platforms for the viewer to get acquainted with contemporary Russian art, as well as in integrating art into the world of business and everyday life. Such synergy allows supporting the art of novice authors or those who are known only in a narrow academic community on a large scale, bringing it closer to the viewer and making the environment filled with cultural and historical heritage.


Source - the site of the network media artmoskovia.ru.