Ismail Akhmetov

Ismail Akhmetov collects contemporary mosaic — an art almost nobody collects. His holdings run to more than three hundred works.

A physicist by education, a graduate of Chelyabinsk University, he is by trade a builder and a manufacturer of materials, founder of the BARS group. Mosaic began as an interest in the Italian craft and became his main occupation: he publishes Solo Mosaico, the only magazine in the world devoted to this art, keeps mosaic workshops in Russia and Italy, and since 2005 an artists' residency in Balabanovo, where he works in smalti himself and hosts other artists.

He lives in Tarusa, and almost everything he has done for culture has been done there. He bought and restored the building of a former hospital of 1870, equipped it, and leased it back to the town for one rouble a year — this is how Tarusa came to have an art department at its children's school of arts. He supports the town chamber orchestra. In 2016 he received the Ministry of Culture award “Patron of the Year”.

Marco Bravura, whose mosaics you see here, came to Russia at his invitation — and stayed, calling it his second home.