Victoria Gallery, Samara, Russia

Victoria Gallery was founded in 2005 by Leonid Mikhelson, Chairman of the Board of PAO Novatek, as a place for accumulating the best private initiatives in Samara.

Victoria Gallery is the city’s largest independent art platform and aims to develop the cultural environment and support contemporary art in the region, introducing works by the best twentieth- and twenty‑first‑century artists and the most compelling trends in contemporary art.

The gallery organizes regular exhibitions of contemporary art from museum collections and projects that introduce viewers to the work of Samara artists. A key part of its work is education, including film screenings, lecture programs on the history and theory of art, and practical drawing, painting, and photography classes.

Since 2016, the gallery has been building a library of publications on contemporary art and culture. In 2021, it joined RAAN and collects documents on the development of art in the region. The focus of the archive is currently on the history of the gallery, which at various times intersected with the work of the Shiryaevo International Biennale of Contemporary Art, V‑A-C Foundation, and with projects by numerous cultural foundations, Moscow and European curators, and self‑organized initiatives, both in Samara and abroad.