"Costakis' Choice"

Author and curator of the project: Polina Lobachevskaya, General Director of the AZ Museum: Natalia Opaleva, Production Designer - Gennady Sinev, Media Artist - Platon Infante, director of the film "Costaki's Gift": Elena Lobachevskaya. The AZ Museum presents a new project dedicated to George Costakis, creator of a unique collection of the First Russian Avant-garde and non-conformist artists. The biographical part of the project will show more than a hundred photographs and documents, as well as the film "Costaki's Gift", in which his daughter Aliki, artists A. Brusilovsky, O. Tselkov, I. Shelkovsky, art critics and museum curators will talk about the collector. They will reminisce and unravel various versions of the twists and turns of life and fate of Costakis, and from the fragmentary reflections of the facets of his difficult, and sometimes mysterious personality in the eyes of his contemporaries, a portrait of a man who saved and preserved the art of the Avant-garde, of which Russia is proud today, will be formed.

Costakis' Choice is not only about the "joy of the hunt" of a collector, precision of sight, fantastic intuition, but also about the ability to make decisions in the most difficult situations. When his life at home, in Moscow, became dangerous for his family and collection, and he was forced to emigrate, Costakis deliberately left the most valuable part of the collection to Russia - the Tretyakov Gallery, the Andrei Rublev Museum and to to the Ministry of Culture. In our project we will present the masterpieces of the First Avant-garde from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery, works of Russian icons from the collection of Andrei Rublev Museum, as well as the folk toy collection from the Tsaritsyno Museum. Platon Infante, contemporary star of the media art will analyse and present the mysteries of the First Russian Avant-garde, which glorified Russian art around the world with the help of modern technologies.

The AZ Museum received more than six hundred works by Anatoly Zverev as a gift from the collector's daughter Aliki Kostaki. At the same time the museum's collection was replenished with works of the representatives of the sixties avant garde wave, selected earlier by George Costakis. Thus part of the Costakis collection has actually become part of the AZ Museum and will be presented to the public in this project. George Costakis dreamed of opening a museum of contemporary art in Moscow which would have been based on his collection. His dream did not come true, the collection was divided, distributed among different museums. His generous gift to Russia was not appreciated for many years, and a hall named after him appeared in the Tretyakov Gallery only recently.

Around the three floors of our museum we would like to create a micro-model of the museum of contemporary art, which George Costakis has dreamed of, to show fragments of his outstanding and unique collection as an actual part of the culture of the XXI century. We want to try to unravel the secret of the stunning energy and bewitching magic of the works of the Russian Avant-garde, as well as the secret of the personality of George Costakis himself, who certainly deserves our gratitude and respect, to try to comprehend the Secret of his Choice.