Art4.ru, which was billed as Russia’s first private contemporary art museum when it opened in Moscow in 2007, has been repurposed into a selling museum, according to its founder, the businessman and art collector Igor Markin.
“Many private museums dabble in selling on the sly. State museums sell to balance their budget. I want to sell brazenly,” he said when the project launched on 3 December.
Art4.ru will now operate like a commercial gallery, with a new programme each month, some consisting of works from Markin’s collection and others set up by rotating galleries and artists.
Its opening show included works by Oleg Khvostov, priced up to €18,000, from the Moscow district gallery and art residence Gridchinhall, and a presentation of works by Leonid Purygin, priced between €6,000 and €90,000, from Markin’s own collection and those of two other private collectors. All the works were prominently labelled with price tags.
Markin says that, paradoxically, Russia’s economic crisis has given the country’s art scene a new lease of life. “Before the crisis, the market was at a standstill; no one was selling because they were waiting for prices to rise even more,” he said.
He sold seven of the 12 works he consigned to the December sale at Vladey, Moscow’s contemporary art auction house, including paintings by Valery Koshlyakov and Oleg Vassiliev, which sold for €75,000 and €70,000 respectively, according to results posted online.
Markin says that the drop in prices enabled him to buy Unnamed (1978), a painting by his favourite artist, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, for €20,000 at the same auction. Before the crisis, a comparable work by Krasnopevtsev could have sold for around €120,000, he says.
