Zelfira Tregulova

On 10 February 2015, Tregulova was appointed the director of the Tretyakov Gallery.^[3] Her predecessor, Irina Lebedeva, was fired. The official explanation was that the visitor infrastructure of the museum was insufficient;^[4] unofficially media speculated that Lebedeva refused to support the Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in public.^[5] However, Tregulova continued with the ambitious exhibition program which was started under Lebedeva. She organized a number of highly popular exhibitions, starting from the retrospective of Valentin Serov in 2016 that generated a long queue of visitors.^[6] The Tretyakov Gallery, which is a museum of Russian art,^[7] also started exhibiting art of other countries.^[8] Furthermore, Tregulova was actively extending the museum collection by pieces of contemporary art.^[1]

While director, Tregulova significantly expanded the exhibition areas. In particular, the building of the museum located on Krymsky Val was fully transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery. Tregulova ordered a reconstruction project of the building hiring architect Rem Koolhaas to carry it out. The project was slated started in 2023. She also opened the museum building in Samara, the first building of the Tretyakov Gallery outside of Moscow. Construction of two more buildings, in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok, started as well. In 2015, the first videoguide in sign language, the first one in Russia, was introduced.^[1]

In 2022, the Russian Orthodox Church demanded that the Trinity icon by Andrei Rublev be temporarily moved to Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius for an event in July 2022.^[9] The demand met with anonymous rejection of museum workers and art historians in Russia, since the painting requires special treatment and needs to be kept in a closed environment. However, Tregulova was apparently ordered by the Ministry of Culture to deliver the painting, which then had to undergo restoration for six months after it was returned to the gallery.^[9][1]

After the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the policy of internationalization and modernization of the museum became obsolete. On 8 February 2023, Tregulova was fired and replaced by Yelena Pronicheva.^[1][10][11]