Zurab Tsereteli Studio Museum

The Zurab Tsereteli Studio Museum occupies a historic mansion on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street, in the area of the historic Georgian Sloboda, which began to be built up as early as the first quarter of the 19th century. The building itself is an architectural landmark of the late 19th century, and since 2009 it has operated as a branch of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, founded by the artist himself.

The stone mansion on this site was built in 1897 by architect Vasily Barkov, commissioned by the merchant Vasily Gorbunov. From 1940 to 1954 the building was occupied by the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which hosted prominent Soviet and foreign figures in culture and politics here. In 1974 the building was granted the status of a protected monument of national significance, and nearly two decades later it began a new life.

In 1993 the buildings of the former merchant’s estate, together with the surrounding grounds, were given to Zurab Tsereteli as an open painting studio. The artist turned the mansion and its courtyard into a working space where paintings, sketches for future monuments, and scaled-down models of sculptures were created — works that would later grow into multi-meter monuments in cities around the world.

The studio became a museum proper in 2009, joining the Moscow Museum of Modern Art as a separate building. The exhibition occupies three floors and includes more than two hundred and fifty works — paintings, graphics, easel and monumental sculpture, stained glass and enamels, as well as the master’s photographs and awards; the display is regularly updated. In the inner courtyard the museum space continues in the open air: mosaic panels, scaled-down models of monuments, sculptures, and other objects are arranged here.

The author of the works on display is Zurab Tsereteli, born in 1934 in Tbilisi, a painter, sculptor, and monumentalist, and long-serving president of the Russian Academy of Arts. Over his career he has created more than five thousand works of painting, graphics, and monumental-decorative art, and has designed dozens of major projects — from the Lenin Memorial in Ulyanovsk and hotel complexes in Izmailovo and Yalta to the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Among his best-known sculptures are Moscow’s monument to Peter the Great, the composition “Eternal Friendship,” dedicated to Russian-Georgian ties, and the figures of “Good Defeats Evil,” installed at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Today the studio museum on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya remains a place where visitors can see the artist’s creative process from the inside — from a pencil sketch to a finished monument — while also standing as a monument of late-19th-century Moscow architecture that has outlasted many changing eras and occupants.