It was founded by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich as the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in 2008 and was renamed on 1 May 2014.

It also runs educational programmes and publishes material relating to current developments in Russian and international art and culture.

[5] In 2012, the museum relocated to a temporary pavilion designed by architect Shigeru Ban in Gorky Park before moving to its permanent home on 12 June 2015.

[1] The museum's new headquarters was originally a modernist building built in 1968 as the Vremena Goda (English:Seasons of the Year), a Soviet-era restaurant.

Moving Away: The Internationalist Architect, which explored the work of a group o trained German architects, Konrad Püschel, Philipp Tolziner [de] and Lotte Stam-Beese, who along with their former teacher, Hannes Meyer, worked in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.