Dmitry Kovalenko began collecting Russian contemporary art in the early 1990s. He supported L Gallery, one of the first galleries to open in Moscow, and later, for a period of time, XL Gallery. Kovalenko is one of the founding members of the Club of Contemporary Art Collectors. He participated in exhibitions drawn from private collections at the ART MOSCOW fair and was, for many years, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.

The present exhibition reflects the principal guiding idea behind the formation of the collection: a work of art should enrich everyday life, both at home and in the office. Most of the works were acquired shortly after their creation, directly from the artists or through galleries, making it possible to trace the artists’ creative development over an extended period of time.

The exhibition includes works by only one-third of the artists represented in the Kovalenko Collection, and only a single work by each artist is on view, selected from different periods of their practice. The core of the collection consists of works by artists associated with the legendary Furmanny and Trekhprudny squats, as well as artists represented by XL Gallery: Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Yuri Albert, Andrei Filippov, Valery Koshlyakov, Alexander Mareev, Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Aidan Salakhova, and Irina Korina. Alongside works by artists whose names became synonymous with the art of the 1990s and 2000s, the exhibition also presents works created during that period by the classics of Moscow Conceptualism and Sots Art — Viktor Pivovarov, Igor Makarevich, Boris Orlov, and Leonid Sokov; works by artists who emerged on the art scene in the 1980s, including Sergei Mironenko, Boris Matrosov, Konstantin Latyshev, Gosha Ostretsov, and Pavel Pepperstein; Yuri Avvakumov’s paper architecture; photographs by Boris Mikhailov; paintings and graphic works by Nikita Alexeev, Semyon Faibisovich, Konstantin Batynkov, Rostan Tavasiev, Anna Zhelud, and Vasily Shumov; as well as works by younger artists whose artistic careers began in the 2000s.