Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art

Erarta is Russia's largest private museum of contemporary art, located on Vasilyevsky Island in St Petersburg. Under one roof it brings together a permanent collection of paintings, graphic works and sculpture, halls for temporary exhibitions, cinema screening rooms and a restaurant. The name combines the English words "era" and "art" — "an era of art" — reflecting the founders' commitment to contemporary creative work independent of state funding.

The museum was founded by the St Petersburg collector Marina Varvarina, who set out to promote Russian contemporary art both at home and abroad. Under the Erarta name, galleries briefly operated in London and Hong Kong in the early 2010s before later closing. For the St Petersburg venue, the founders chose a five-storey building dating from 1951, built in the style of late Stalinist neoclassicism on the 29th Line of Vasilyevsky Island; it had previously housed a district Communist Party committee and later the Lebedev Institute of Synthetic Rubber. Converting the premises for museum use took about three years.

The building covers more than 12,000 square metres, making it one of the city's largest exhibition venues. The façade retains the austere proportions of Stalinist neoclassicism, while the interior has been entirely reorganised: spacious halls with neutral lighting, separate screening rooms for video art and animation programmes, and a restaurant on the fourth floor. At the entrance, visitors are greeted by the bronze figures of Era and Arta, created by the sculptor Dmitry Zhukov, and part of the interior walls is covered with original murals.

The doors opened to visitors on 20 May 2010, with the official grand opening following four months later, on 30 September. The collection brings together more than 2,800 works by over 300 Russian artists from the second half of the 20th century to the early 21st century, ranging from late Soviet realism to abstraction and primitivism. Since 2013 the museum has run its own festivals, including Erarta Motion Pictures, a programme of short films about painting, and the Cross Art project, which combined several art forms within a single work. The venue has also hosted sculptures by Salvador Dalí, photographs by Sebastião Salgado, costumes from Fellini's films and collectible Lamborghini models.

Each year the museum stages around thirty temporary exhibitions of painting, sculpture, photography and design, combining projects by emerging artists with shows by established names on the art scene. Since 2015 the collection has been available online through the Google Arts & Culture project — Erarta became the first Russian contemporary art museum to join the programme. National Geographic has listed the museum among St Petersburg's leading cultural attractions, while the Financial Times has ranked it among the city's most interesting spaces.

Over a decade and a half, Erarta has established itself as a venue that fosters interest in contemporary Russian art outside the academic establishment. The museum receives no state funding and supports itself through ticket sales, exhibition projects and gallery operations, remaining the country's largest private collection of contemporary art.