Curated by Kate Fowle and Katya Inozemtseva with Marie-Puck Broodthaers

Since much of his art and poetry was filled with black humor, it’s easy to imagine Marcel Broodthaers, were he still alive, relishing the irony of his first solo show in Russia coming at this moment in time. After all, he joined the Communist Party during World War II (he was expelled in 1951) and negotiated between a group of occupying artists and officials of the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, in May 1968. Months later, Broodthaers created a fictional museum, which performed a pas de deux between culture and institutions. On view at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, founded by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich—the mega-collector, Putin ally, and eleventh-richest man in Russia—will be a range of works across many media, from early-1960s objects to late installations, such as Décors, 1974–75, to films, vacuum-formed Industrial Poems, and fragments from the artist’s first iteration of his fictional museum, inaugurated September 27, 1968. This exhibition opens fifty years (and two days) later.

— Todd Alden