Erarta

Erarta is the largest private museum of contemporary art in Russia, located in Saint Petersburg on Vasilyevky Island. Its name is derived from the fusion of the words 'Era' and 'Arta,' which can be translated from Russian as 'the era of art.' Since its establishment, the museum has been recognized as one of the '5 Cultural Gems' of Saint Petersburg by National Geographic and has gained prominence for its extensive collection and dynamic exhibition program.

Erarta Museum officially opened to the public on September 30, 2010, though it had welcomed initial visitors earlier on May 20, 2010, and continued to adjust its galleries during the first months of operation. From its inception, the museum has pursued an active agenda that includes staging exhibitions, publishing art catalogues, organizing guided tours, and developing educational programs. It also launched several signature projects, such as Erarta Motion Pictures, which ran from 2013 to 2017 and was billed as the world's only festival of short films about painting, and the CROSS ART International Festival of Synthesis of Arts, held from 2013 to 2015, which invited participants to combine multiple art forms. In 2013, the museum was rated among the top 10 museums in Russia by TripAdvisor users. On June 30, 2015, its collection became digitally accessible through the Google Arts & Culture Project, making it the first Russian contemporary art museum to join the initiative. In 2024, a Saint Petersburg court case was filed against the museum regarding the display of a painting by Belarusian artist Sergei Grinevich titled Festival, which had been in the collection since 2016; the dispute concerned a phrase inserted under the painting in 2020 that complainants alleged violated laws against displaying 'Nazi propaganda.' In January 2025, a representative of the political party A Just Russia referred to the museum as a 'factory of Russophobic images,' and there had been prior attempts to restrict the institution. The museum also offers annual passes to visitors.

The Erarta Museum collection contains over 2,800 works dating from the 1950s to the present, created by more than 300 artists from across Russia. The holdings span a wide range of styles and media, including realism, abstraction, and primitivism, and encompass paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, installations, and video art. While the core of the collection is built around works by Saint Petersburg artists, the museum actively seeks talent nationwide. The collection is noted for its predominantly nonconformist character, with artists representing several generations and orientations in Russian contemporary art. Among the better-known names represented are Saven Arshakuni, Vyacheslav Mikhailov, Vladimir Dukhovlinov, Elena Figurina, Valery Lukka, and Rinat Voligamsi. Other notable artists include Dmitri Zhukov, Vladlen Gavrilchik, and Yevgeny Ukhnalyov. The museum also engages with new artistic directions such as science art.

Specific works highlighted from the collection include Nikolai Kopeikin's Patrie (2008), an acrylic painting measuring 180 by 180 centimeters, and Rinat Voligamsi's Svet (Light, 2008), an oil on canvas measuring 70 by 70 centimeters. The museum also holds Sergei Shnurov's Shirt (2005), an oil painting measuring 161 by 182 centimeters. Beyond its permanent collection, Erarta has organized numerous high-profile temporary exhibitions. In 2015, to mark its fifth anniversary, it hosted the first Russian show by Brazilian pop-art artist Romero Britto and exhibited works by award-winning Irish haute couture milliner Philip Treacy. In 2016, exhibitions featured Soviet and Russian photojournalist Yuri Abramochkin, known for his portrait of Yuri Gagarin, and Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, alongside the Glorious World of Fellini project, which showcased more than 50 costumes from the Italian director's films. In 2017, jointly with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Erarta presented Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear, a retrospective of underwear design from the 18th to the early 21st centuries. That same year, the museum opened a new exhibition space for large-scale art objects and vehicles, inaugurated with LAMBORGHINI: Design Legend, an exhibition of rare Italian supercars. Other notable exhibitions have included Brandrealism: A Retrospective by musician and Leningrad band frontman Sergey Shnurov (2017), monumental bronze sculptures by Salvador Dali (2018), works by contemporary Chinese artist Liu Bolin (2018), monumental paintings by nonconformist artist Igor Novikov (2021), photographs by fashion photographer Mario Testino (2019), and Style Ducati, an exhibition of collectors' edition Italian motorcycles with design concepts, photos, and videos (2019). In 2019, the museum also presented works by Russian sculptor Georgiy Frangulyan.

Erarta is housed in a five-storey building constructed in 1951 in the Stalinist classicism style for the local district committee of the Communist Party. During the Soviet era, the building was occupied by the Synthetic Rubber Research Institute named after S. V. Lebedev. At the entrance to the museum, two sculptures titled Era and Arta were commissioned by Erarta and created by sculptor Dmitry Zhukov. Inside the museum, visitors can also see wall murals by the same artist.

The museum is located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on Vasilyevsky Island, and is combined with the Erarta Galleries. As a private institution, it stages around 40 temporary exhibitions annually across painting, sculpture, photography, fashion, design, and video art, showcasing both emerging talents and established international artists. The museum features several cinema halls: one on the third floor screens Art-Animation, short animated films inspired by paintings from the collection, while another shows The Adventures of BB Square cartoon series (2014). Among its unique visitor offerings are U-spaces, immersive installations created with various artists that provide a 15-minute emotional and mental experience for groups of up to five people, and YOUnits on the third floor, which are 50 small cubicles that can be rented for creative self-expression across media including design, photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and collage. The museum also runs the Russia in Erarta project, which promotes contemporary Russian art through traveling exhibitions to cities such as Krasnodar, Omsk, Surgut, Khanty-Mansiysk, Kazan, Saratov, Lipetsk, Kirov, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, and Veliky Novgorod, while also bringing works from cities like Samara, Perm, Novosibirsk, Izhevsk, Ufa, and Vladivostok to Saint Petersburg. In 2019, Erarta presented The Valley of Colours, a family book written by founder Marina Varvarina and illustrated by artist Nikolai Kopeikin.