Library

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has a public library on Russian and international contemporary art open to all visitors. Garage Library is a reference library and has a collection of 30,000 books, including catalogues of solo and group exhibitions and studies on contemporary art and culture.

Launched in 2014, Garage Library became the first public library in Russia devoted entirely to the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Publications available at the library cover a wide range of subjects related to the development of art from early modernism and the avant-garde to the present day: artistic practices, contemporary philosophy, cultural studies, social theory, gender and postcolonial studies, media theory, visual studies, photography, architecture, design, cinema, theatre, and fiction

The collection keeps expanding with the addition of new publications. Along with exhibition catalogues from Russian and international museums (Tretyakov Gallery, Russian Museum, Stedelijk, Centre Pompidou, MoMA), the library acquires new studies released by leading Russian and international publishers (NLO, HSE, MIT Press, Hatje Cantz, Gestalten). In addition to new releases, the library boasts a collection of rare books.

A wide selection of periodicals from across the world includes key journals on visual art (Artforum, Flash Art, Mousse), photography (Aperture, Camera Austria, Foam) and architecture (Architectural Review, Domus, Mark). Along with recent issues, the library holds copies of rare archived issues of art theory and criticism journals (October, Third Text), and Russian periodicals from before and after perestroika (A-Ya, Mesto pechati, Kabinet, Dekorativnoye iskusstvo).

All books and catalogues published by Garage, including those in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press, are also available at the library.

Visitors can access the online catalogue to search for books and periodicals by subject, key words, authors, and personalities.

Several tables at the library are equipped with computers; visitors have access to the Internet and academic resources like Artstor and JSTOR, and are welcome to use the free scanners.

To bring books in its collection to the public attention, Garage Library runs a program of public events and reading groups.

In 2017, the library launched Single Copy, a project to support the development of the genre of the artist’s book in Russia.

Daily: 11 a.m.–9 p.m.
National holidays: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

All services at the library (admission, scanning, wi-fi) are free of charge.
To use the library, please bring your passport and get a library pass.
Visitors can only scan texts if they bring their own portable storage device.
Publications marked “Access by request” are issued based on a preliminary application containing links to electronic catalogue entries and sent to library@garagemca.org no later than one working day before the planned visit to the library. No more than ten publications can be borrowed by one person at a time. The books have to be returned personally to the librarian on duty.

Library catalogue

Go to catalogue

Storage location

Moscow, Garage Archive Collection
St. Petersburg, Garage Archive Collection

Subjects

Authors

New arrivals

Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape

2002

Song of the Earth showcases the work of five important contemporary artists (Herman de Vries, Chris Drury, Nikolaus Lang, Richard Long and Giuseppe Penone) who work in the landscape and make use of the materials and processes of nature. Their methods favour observation, collecting and forms of manipulation that are more reflective than intrusive, setting them firmly apart from artists of the American Land Art movement working over the same period. This artists do not belong to a particular school, but they are united by their empathy for nature and their decision to work outside the urban contexts of much modernist art. Interviews with the artists reveal both widely differing motivation in their approaches to their work and striking similiarities in their underlying concerns, and, sometimes, in their methods of working. The introductory essay by Mel Gooding places these artists in both historical and contemporary contexts, as well as discussing other artists including Joseph Beuys, Sjoerd Buisman, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash.