After the Soviet era criminal rule on social parasitism was abolished on 1 March 1986, he quit his job to write a novel and to start his own business.

That was also the year when Dukley European Art Community residency program was launched by Neil Emilfarb, Petar Cukovic, and Guelman.

The activities of the residency program have been gradually making significant changes to the cultural status of Kotor, the city hosting the project, and to all of Montenegro.

Marat Guelman has chosen this country to further advance and implement his concept of post-economy society and humanitarian engineering[11] On 30 December 2021, Russia's Ministry of Justice added Gelman to its list of “foreign agents”.

Over the years, the gallery had collaborations with almost every prominent artist of the respective period, from the classics of Moscow conceptualism (Yuri Albert, Igor Makarevich, Vadim Zakharov, Dmitri Prigov), Sots Art (Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid, Boris Orlov, Leonid Sokov) and postmodernism (Pavel Pepperstein, Georgy Ostretsov, Evgeny Semyonov) to St. Petersburg “New Academy” artists (Timur Novikov), to the legendary Mitki group, and Moscow action Art (Oleg Kulik, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alexander Brener, Oleg Mavromati, Avdey Ter-Oganyan, RADEK group), to South Russian Wave (Alexander Sigutin, Arsen Savadov, Alexander Roitburd, Oleg Golosiy), to the pioneers of media art (Blue Soup group, AES+F, Olga Chernysheva, Vladislav Efimov & Aristarkh Chernyshev); and from painters (Yury Shabelnikov, Valery Koshlyakov, Alexander Vinogradov & Vladimir Dubosarsky, Dmitry Vrubel) to photographers (Boris Mikhailov, ladislav Mamyshev-Monroe), architects (Alexander Brodsky, Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt, sculptors (Dmitry Gutov, Grisha Bruskin, Martynchik couple) and artists who work with installations and new media (Irina Nakhova, Vladimir Arkhipov, Blue Noses group[17] and others).

Amongst other things, during its Yakimanka st. period, Guelman Gallery hosted such landmark events as Andy Warhol’s and Joseph Beuys’s personal exhibitions (Alter Ego, 1994 and Leonardo's Diary, 1994, respectively).

In April 2012, Marat Guelman as well as Elena Selina and Aidan Salahova, also among Russia's leading gallerists, announced that they would redesign the operation of their galleries.

Guelman stated that the main reason behind it was the shrinking of the contemporary art market in Russia due to the general political and economic instability.

The Cultural Alliance production center specializes in exhibiting art from Russia's regions and the Commonwealth of Independent States in Moscow venues.

Turning his attention to regional art was not a mere accident for Guelman: from his very first exhibitions back in the 1990s he has engaged in searching for new artists and bringing them to Moscow.

The name of the gallery, as well as a significant part of its concept, comes from the Cultural Alliance association, founded by Guelman in 2010 in collaboration with the United Russia political party.

[32] The exhibition, supported by Sergei Gordeev, the Representative of the Administration of Perm Region in the Federation Council of Russia, came to be a landmark project for Guelman in terms of his work as a curator.

The exhibition included the works of the most prominent Russian artists of today, both of those renowned (Yuri Albert, Vladimir Arkhipov, Dmitry Gutov, Nikolay Polissky, Leonid Sokov, Igor Makarevich, Alexander Brodsky, Yury Shabelnikov, Sergei Shekhovtsov, and others) and young (Recycle, Anya Zholud, Zhanna Kadyrova, Ilya Trushevsky).

It was held on the premises of Perm River Terminal, which was at the time out of work and rundown, restored to the minimum level required for the exhibition at Gordeev's expense.

The case of the Russian Povera and its huge success paved the beginning of a large-scale project aimed at making Perm the “cultural capital” of Russia.

[33] The River Terminal, which had hosted Russian Povera, now restored and revamped, became the seat of Perm Museum of Contemporary Art (PERMM).

One of the museum's exhibitions, Vision, was shown in St. Petersburg in 2010 and in Tver in 2011, Russian Povera traveled to Milan in 2011,[39] Fatherland was displayed in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk in 2012.

The museum was involved in creating and implementing the concept of the festival, supported by Oleg Chirkunov, ex-governor of Perm Krai.

The media believe that the cause leading to Guelman's dismissal from the post of PERMM's director was the personal exhibition of Vasily Slonov, a Krasnoyarsk-based artist, titled Welcome!