Tickets 

The Museum of Russian Impressionism presents ‘The Art of Transporting Art’, a special project prepared in partnership with the art logistics company Fineartway. This conceptual continuation of the exhibition ‘Avant-Garde: On a Cart to the 21st Century’ reveals the processes that remain out of sight for visitors — from the packaging and transportation of paintings to the installation and dismantling of expositions. On the third floor of the museum there are interactive objects and works by the contemporary artists Misha Most, Valery Chtak, Jacob Yakubov and Grigory Tsvetkov.

In the 1920s art works for travelling exhibitions were often transported on carts, with ordinary hay and roughly-hewn wooden boxes used as packaging materials. Today museums have special transport and professional equipment at their disposal: vehicles with air suspension, climate-control crates and acid-free packaging materials. The special project explains why state-of-the-art crates can cost several tens or even hundreds of thousands of rubles; how a fragile plaster sculpture, a painting on canvas or a graphic sheet under glass can be safely transported; and why the transportation of art has also become an art form. Visitors will find out how delicate handling is required when working with museum exhibits, they will see the differences between household packaging materials and professional ones, and will be shown how the fate of a work of art may depend on the selected adhesive tape, the type of box or film.

The exhibition features a graphic sketch of the work ‘TRANSPORTATION’ by Russian street artist Misha Most from the series ‘The Future of the Past’, created for the design of the art logistics company Fineartway’s vehicle. Valery Chtak’s installation ‘Anarquismo individualista’, in which wooden boxes act as canvases, will be shown for the first time. This refers to the work of avant-garde artists who used boards, pieces of wallpaper and linoleum in their works. Jacob Yakubov also prefers non-standard materials. Made in the form of an air-bubble film, the concrete object ‘Pop It’ becomes ‘a symbol of the impermanence of the material environment, in which there is nothing but air’.

The video performance ‘packing-unpacking’ is also part of the exhibition, presenting the stages of packaging and exhibiting art objects: from opening the climate-control crate to hanging items in museum halls.

Project curators: 

Daria Uryadova — Coordinator of Exhibition Projects at the Museum of Russian Impressionism.

Diana Motsonashvili — Managing Partner of the art logistics company Fineartway.