The Hermitage makes plans to change its artistic traditions

The problem of placing a collection of contemporary art today is the most relevant for State Hermitage Museum . A museum that exhibits nothing but the art of the past runs the risk of becoming a dead space. In 2007, the young curator Dmitry Ozerkov was put at the head of the 20/21 project, designed to solve the existing problems of the contemporary art exposition.

The Hermitage regularly arranged exhibitions of living artists for many years. The exposition of Antony Gormley’s works was held here last year. In 2001, a large art exhibition was organized by Louise Bourgeois, which was held with great success.

This week, a renovated part of the General Staff building opened for visitors. It is expected that the full reconstruction project will be completed by 2014, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Hermitage by Catherine the Great. The building itself is an architectural monument, but that part of it that suffered during the war will be redesigned into modern exhibition halls. In the coming months, the building of the General Staff Building will host exhibitions of contemporary art, as well as paintings of the 19th and earlier centuries. For the first time, the works of Rembrandt and Picasso will be shown on the opposite side of the Palace Square.

Currently, part of the premises is given to the exhibition of Jake and Dinos Chapman (Jake and Dinos Chapman) "The End of Fun". A series of works showcase dizzying landscapes with skulls and Ronald MacDonald in a boat surrounded by sharks. An exhibition of Dmitry Prigov, a Moscow conceptualist who died in 2007, also opened here last week.

In addition, the Museum has a rich collection of Russian avant-garde art, which was simply ignored in Soviet times. And perhaps the biggest problem facing the Hermitage today is how to tell the history of art in the 20th century, without turning into the Russian equivalent of MoMa.

Anna Sidorova