AZ Museum is an intensively evolving private museum in the very center of Moscow. Founded in 2015, the Museum houses а daunting collection of works by Anatoly Zverev, one of the leading figures in Soviet unofficial art. It is a Free New Generation Museum that meets present-day challenges. Art is no longer static, and all museums change their installations with increasing frequency. Artwork is now available to view online, and our perception of reality has changed. The spaces dedicated to enjoying art must meet visitors’ demands for exciting—instead of boring—spaces.
The initials of the great Russian artist Anatoly Zverev are used in the museum title, and conveniently, these two letters span the museum’s entire collection. In temporary exhibitions, you can see the masterpieces of unofficial Soviet art—from A to Z. The logo is mobile and responds to different formats as the museum itself responds with new exhibitions.
At the AZ Museum, you can do anything you want, so long as it won’t harm the collection. Here you can play, lie around on the floor and gather in large groups. There is no permanent exhibit, as the Museum’s collection contains more than 2,000 works by Anatoly Zverev and his contemporaries, allowing the works to constantly rotate at temporary exhibitions.
Our aim was to refresh the museum’s image by showing the mobility of cultural spaces through visual language and by telling about their unique characteristics, like a widely varied collection and the absence of a permanent exhibit. We created an idea, identity and website for the museum.
The museum’s mission — and, in the greater scheme of things, the task of art in general—is to enter into dialog with visitors. The Museum does not just show still lifes and landscapes; it tells stories. That is why text (and therefore typography) plays a key role in its visual style.
The Druk + Akzidenz Grotesk font pair performs two tasks at once. Druk allows us to be noticeable and modern for short and perky communications, while Akzidenz gives us functionality for curatorial and other longer texts online. It turned out to be a sprightly, but very profound couple. After all, AZ defines itself as a modern museum, but not as an entertainment center.
As an independent institution, The AZ Museum can afford to have a relaxed visual aesthetic. Rough blocks of condensed typography and a tabular site form are animated with “mush,” which is itself a kind of manifesto. According to this manifesto, the visual language of a modern museum can be just as free in its self-expression as art itself.
