Balashikha Historical and Art Museum. Picture Gallery Department

About museum

Balashikha Picture Gallery was opened in 1978 by decision of the Executive Committee of the City Council of Workers' Deputies of the Moscow Region. The initiators of this historic move were an initiative group of Balashikha artists led by Leonid Stil. In recent years the gallery's exhibition work has become a defining feature of the city's cultural landscape.
Today the museum's permanent collection numbers around 8,000 works of art by leading masters of Soviet-period fine art and by Balashikha authors.
Extensive work is being carried out in the study, museification and formation of the permanent collection of naive art. Today the naive art collection contains more than 2,000 items of painting, graphics and decorative-applied art — including the Pushkiniana of Boris Zhivotov, the graphics of Vera Pavlovich, Alexey Kirikovich and Ivan Nikiforov, the paintings of German Blinov, Sergey Leonov, Olga Lobanova, Katya Medvedeva and other representatives of naive art whose names have entered encyclopedias and reference books on naive art.
Over the past decade special attention has been paid to the art of photography, and the Balashikha Festival of Creative Photography is the logical continuation of the museum's many years of work in this always lively and interesting form of visual art.
The Picture Gallery is a museum-educational center: thematic and general guided tours are held here, and a lecture series operates where attendees are introduced to the history of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet art, its types, genres, artistic styles and the work of the masters. The tour and lecture programs are engaging and informative for both children and adults, for family audiences as well as for people with disabilities.