The Molchanovs also own more than 1,000 works of African art ranging from bronze and terracotta sculptures from Nigeria and the Kingdom of Benin to kifwebe masks of the Songye and Luba peoples of the Congo River basin\u2014a collection they bought from Mikhail Zvyagin, a New York-based artist who was born in St Petersburg.<\/p>\n
As President Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip on power and suppressed artistic freedoms, Russia\u2019s private museums have increasingly been forced to tread carefully; any hint of dissent can lead to security raids and harassment. The wealthy owners of several museums have fled the country, as have many high-profile curators. Sanctions, meanwhile, make collaborations with Western museums impossible.<\/p>\n
Zilart launches with connections to the state: Andrey Molchanov\u2019s profile in the Russian Forbes list of billionaires, which puts his net worth at $1.3bn, notes that his stepfather, Yuri Molchanov, worked with Putin at St Petersburg State University. The Molchanovs\u2019 art adviser is Alexander Borovsky, the head of contemporary art at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg.<\/p>\n
A 10,000-strong collection<\/p>\n
\u201cThe museum is private and entirely funded by LSR Group and receives no financial support from the City of Moscow or the state,\u201d Zilart\u2019s press office says. It quotes Molchanov as saying: \u201cWhile collaborations with other Russian museums are under consideration, the museum\u2019s own collection currently numbers around 10,000 works, providing the basis for at least the next ten exhibitions.\u201d <\/p>\n
Zilart\u2019s founding has not been frictionless. Conceived in 2015 as a Modern art outpost of the State Hermitage Museum, its first design, by the New York architect Hani Rashid, was inspired by El Lissitzky. But Rashid was abruptly dropped from the project in 2021, to be replaced by the Russian-born German architect Sergei Tchoban. After emigrating to Germany in the 1990s, Tchoban started his Moscow firm, Speech, with Sergey Kuznetsov, who since 2012 has served as the chief architect and first deputy chairman of the Committee for Architecture and Urban Planning of Moscow.<\/p>\n
Rashid tells The Art Newspaper that the museum\u2019s current design is \u201ca significantly diluted and distorted version of the original proposal\u201d. Zilart\u2019s press office says Tchoban created an entirely new design.<\/p>\n
Since 2023 the Hermitage has also no longer been involved. Dimitri Ozerkov, then in charge of contemporary art at the Hermitage and its plans for the new Moscow branch, left Russia in 2022<\/a> in protest at the invasion of Ukraine. \u201cAs circumstances evolved, we realised that we had the vision and resources to create a museum independently,\u201d Zilart\u2019s press office says. Irina Tolpina, who previously ran Manege, an exhibition space near the Kremlin, is Zilart\u2019s founding director.<\/p>\n The museum\u2019s final design was by Sergei Tchoban Photo: Ilya Ivanov<\/p>\n A cube of glass transected by tilted copper beams, the museum is built on what was formerly the site of the 400-hectare Soviet ZiL car factory. It is now a residential complex developed by LSR, featuring streets named after avant-garde artists including Wassily Kandinsky<\/a>, El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko. A sculpture from the Dump Truck series by the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye<\/a>, acquired by the Molchanovs about ten years ago, was installed in front of Zilart in September, launching the museum\u2019s public art programme.<\/p>\n The neighbourhood is promoted as an urban renewal achievement on City of Moscow websites. Analysts say Moscow\u2019s infrastructure and digital transformation, led by the mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, has muted protests against repression and Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n An initial 2011 proposal put forward by Yury Grigoryan of the Moscow architecture studio Meganom\u2014which envisaged revamping the ZiL factory district while partially preserving its once-imposing 1920s-30s industrial architecture and workers\u2019 housing\u2014was never realised, says Anna Bronovitskaya, an architectural historian. The cost of cleaning the chemical contamination of the buildings was considered prohibitively expensive, so instead they were demolished, she says. The masterplan that was adopted, also proposed by Grigoryan, aims to create a modern \u201ccity within a city\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThis vast and ambitious project\u2014a completely new residential district on a former industrial site\u2014was marketed to higher-income families,\u201d Bronovitskaya says. \u201cTo compensate for its not-so-central location, it was branded Zilart, implying the presence of high-quality public art, architecture with artistic value designed by leading Russian and international firms, and an art museum.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a time when many Russian private museums are struggling for survival and some have been forced to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,3926,10748,86040,154,118719,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-293371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-moscow","14":"tag-museums","15":"tag-private-museums","16":"tag-russia","17":"tag-soviet-art","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/8c133d6a3c6d0c2701ba7ec6666d03f75d1d023a-783x1175.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n