The Museum’s collections present main stages of the avant-garde art development. The largest part of the collections includes artworks by Russian artists, but there are works by international masters in the collections, i. e. prints by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Joan Miro and Giorgio de Chirico, sculptures by Salvador Dali, Arman and Arnaldo Pomodoro, paintings by Henri Rousseau and Françoise Gilot, installations by Ukinori Yanaga.

Artworks by Russia’s early 20 century avant-garde painters form the core of the Museum’s collections. Many works were purchased at European and American auctions and galleries, and returned to the motherland from abroad. Paintings by Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Vladimir Tatlin, Pavel Filonov and Wassily Kandinsky, sculptures by Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine are among them. The Museum is also proud of its unique gathering of artworks by Niko Pirosmani, a Georgian primitive artist.

A considerable part of the exposition is devoted to the Russian non-conformist art, 1960-1980s. Masters, formerly known as underground and now internationally recognized, are Ilya Kabakov, Anatoly Zverev, Vladimir Yakovlev, Vladimir Nemukhin, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Oscar Rabin, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Leonid Shvartsman, Oleg Tselkov, and others.

The Museum supports the Russian contemporary art development and constantly enriches its collections. Artworks by Boris Orlov, D. A. Prigov, Valery Koshlyakov, Vladimir Dubosarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, Oleg Kulik, Victor Pivovarov, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Andrei Bartenev, and others are in the actual art section.