AZ Museum

“It’s not me who is donating - it’s my father…” (from Alika Kostaki's interview concerning her gift to the AZ Museum). In 2015, the Anatoly Zverev Museum was opened in Moscow. Its founders were the financier and philanthropist Natalia Opaleva, as well as curator and gallery owner Polina Lobachevskaya. It is known that George Costakis especially appreciated Zverev and distinguished him among all the artists of the second half of the twentieth century.

It seems that it was inevitable that the appearance of the Zverev Museum will also be associated with the name of Costakis. A kind of prelude to the founding of the AZ Museum was the Zverev on Fire Exhibition, created by curator P. Lobachevskaya in the New Manege space in Moscow in 2012 which was based on the pieces inherited by Natalia Kostaki. For the first time, Zverev's graphic works which miraculously survived the fire at the house in Bakovka were presented for the first time in such a large-scale contemparary exhibition. The project was an incredible success - almost all entries in the guest book came to one conclusion: Moscow needs the Zverev Museum.

While the museum was founded and the building was under construction, Aliki Kostaki, the daughter of the great collector, decided to donate for the future “Zverev's House” almost all of the artist's works that were kept by her in Greece - more than 600 works. A third of them were shown at the exhibition “Anatoly Zverev. On the Threshold of a New Museum "in 2014. When the Zverev Museum opened in a reconstructed building on Tverskaya-Yamskaya, its collection was also replenished with a collection of non-conformist artists, (unofficial artists of the 1950s-80s), which previously belonged to the Costakis family.