The Seven Winds Аrt Foundation was established in 2010 by a businessman, public figure, art collector Nikolai Malygin and art expert Lyubov Yakhontova. The idea of creating the Foundation was born during a plein-air painting session by a group of Russian artists in Kamyshin, a small town on the Volga river near Volgograd.
In Russian, «seven winds» means a place located at the intersection of roads, open to all winds. And the number «seven» reflects the harmony of our world: seven colors in the rainbow, seven notes in music, seven days in a week, and, of course, there is the seventh heaven.

One of the main objectives of the Foundation is to support and promote contemporary Russian artists. Over the years, the Foundation has held more than 40 different scale exhibitions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Saratov, Volgograd, and Kamyshin. The Foundation successfully cooperates with state museums and art galleries, helping to promote talented artists. It establishes awards, grants, scholarships and sponsors exhibition projects.
The exhibition activity of the Foundation is inextricably linked with scientific, educational, publishing and collecting activities, which include the heritage of Russian artists of the first half of the 20th century.
The Foundation traditionally holds "Kamyshin plein-airs" gatherings, which bring together artists from Volgograd, Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities. Today, the Foundation’s collection has about 2,000 items. Among them are works by such masters as Mikhail Shemyakin, Boris Messerer, Pavel Kuznetsov, Tatyana Mavrina, Evgeny Strulev, Alexander Florensky, Aron Bukh, Viktor Dynnikov, Vladimir Favorsky, Gennady Ustyugov, Anna Zhelud, Valentin Yustitsky, Nikolay Guschin. Saratov Nonconformists, Volgograd Postcubists and Expressionists are also well represented, as well as works by young graphic artists who are experimenting with material and form.

Mikhail Shemyakin was born on May 4, 1943. One of the most famous contemporary Russian artists. Painter, graphic artist, sculptor, theorist, theatrical figure and cinematographer. In 1962, the first solo exhibition of Shemyakin was opened in St. Petersburg. In 1971, after numerous arrests and compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital, he was expelled from Soviet Russia. Since 1971 he lived in Paris. 10 years later he moved to New York. In 2007 he returned to France, where he currently lives. Shemyakin’s works are exhibited in many museums of the USA, France, Russia. They are also hosted in numerous private collections around the world. The works of Mikhail Shemyakin, belonging to the Seven Winds Art Foundation, reflect the early, pre-immigrant period of his creativity and allow us to trace the path of the artist’s formation.

After an exhibition of Petr Zverkhovsky in Pontelagoscuro, Italy, Italian artist Ottavio Romano wrote: «To Petr Zverkhovsky, maestro of colors strong and unexpected, who gave me unique emotions and an acute nostalgia for experimentation in painting…”
The problem of color and its interaction with shape, displacement, deformation – for Petr Zverkhovsky, this is a fascinating area of human knowledge that is included in a painting. The artist believes in the inexhaustible possibilities of the painting tradition. Despite the expansion of new forms of art, Petr Zverkhovsky continues to create his color-figurative version of the world.
Petr Zverkhovsky’s works are held in museums and private collections in Italy, France, Spain, Holland, Germany, the UK, the USA and Russia.

Boris Messerer was born on March 15, 1933. He currently lives in Moscow. As a cousin of ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, the husband of poet Bella Akhmadulina, a friend of cosmonaut Vladimir Aksyonov, Tonino Guerra, a famous Italian poet and writer, Mikhail Shemyakin, Soviet, American and Russian painter and sculptor, cultural icon Vladimir Vysotsky and his wife, Marina Vlady, poet Joseph Brodsky, and ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Messerer was known as «the King of Moscow’s Bohemia”. Metropol — the independent literary almanac of the Soviet era – was created in Messerer’s studio. Messerer himself was a set designer, architect, muralist, watercolorist, painter, etcher, book illustrator, theater artist and designer.
The works of Boris Messerer are exhibited in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the A.A. Bakhrushin Theater Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, as well as in private collections in Russia and abroad.
The Seven Winds Art Foundation’s collection of Messerer’s work include theatrical sketches, watercolors, etchings.
The Foundation also created a large exhibit from Boris Messerer’s personal collection that was on display at the Saratov Museum of Fine Art. The exhibit featured paintings and drawings by Messerer, along with personal archival photographs with such famous personae as authors Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Heinrich Böll, and director Michelangelo Antonioni.

The creative work of Gleb Vyatkin deserves a separate page in the history of Russian art of the 20th century. It existed outside both official and nonconformist art. Interest in this kind of art increases nowadays.
The pictorial space in Vyatkin’s works is based on the development of modernist ideas of West European and Russian art of the early 20th century, especially Cubism.
Vyatkin began his artistic education as a musician. As a violinist, he played in famous orchestras and chamber ensembles. But at the age of 26, he radically changed his destiny and entered the faculty of monumental art of the Leningrad’s V. I. Mukhina Higher Art School (now the St. Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design).
Vyatkin creates murals, mosaics, sgraffito, graphic works, and paintings. For his fresco “Motherhood” in the “City of Murals,” Cibiana di Cadore (Italy), the artist was awarded the Big Titian's Gold Medal, a "Revival" Fund’s medal for contribution in culture. In Italy, where the artist worked as a muralist and as a painter, his style was defined as post cubism.

Gleb Vyatkin’s works are housed in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, in Moscow Museum of Modern Art, in the Perm Art Gallery (the artist’s hometown), in the Krasnodar Art Museum, in the Volgograd Museum of Fine Arts, in the Nikolai Gogol Museum in Moscow, as well as in 50 private collections in Germany, France, Italy, Bolivia, Hungary, the United States, Israel, and Russia.
In honor of Vyatkin’s 80th jubilee the Seven Winds Art Foundation organized his personal exhibition. The Foundation has released three albums of the artist's works - “Theme and Variations” (2007), “Sound in the Score” (2014), “Gleb Vyatkin” (2019).

Stanislav Azarov was born on May 27, 1977 in Volgograd.

In 1999, he graduated from the Voronezh State Pedagogical University with  specialization in “Printed Graphics”.

Since 2002 - Member of the Union of Artists of Russia.

Since 1998, he has been active in exhibition activities. He takes part in different exhibition projects, performances, decorates interiors, he is engaged in printed graphics, photography. Since 2003, Azarov has been actively involved in the artistic life of Moscow, exhibiting at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, at the popular exhibitions in ART-MANEZH, KHUDGRAF, and in various private galleries of the capital. Since 2015, he has been actively cooperating with the House of the P.V. Kuznetsov Museum in Saratov.

The works of the artist Stanislav Azarov are in the museum of miniprint in Belgium (Museum du Petit Format), in the gallery ADOGIminiprint Cadaques, in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, as well as in private collections in Germany, Great Britain, Spain, USA, Russia.

Elena Sivishkina was born in 1964 in the city of Volgograd. She graduated from the Faculty of Art of the Kursk Pedagogical Institute.
Since 1995 he has been working at the Children's Art School № 1 named after V.V. Fedorov.
Since 2000 - Member of the Union of Artists of Russia. Participant of regional, All-Russian and international exhibitions.

The artist is characterized by a keen perception of the organic rhythm of things, the expressive power of color, its symbolism, the artist’s right to a subjective perception of reality, which creates a special relationship between emotional experience, form and color. She never copies or repeats her works - one can’t get the emotional impulse on demand. 

In the Volgograd Museum of Fine Arts named after I.I. Mashkov successfully passed 2 personal exhibitions of the artist (2014 - “Blue regained”, in 2019 - “Blue horsewoman of the yellow steppes”).

For more than 10 years, the Seven Winds Art Foundation has been inviting artists from Volgograd, Saratov, Moscow and St. Petersburg to traditional plein-airs in Kamyshin, an old town on the Volga river, small but a very picturesque one.
In 2007, at the invitation of Nikolai Malygin, a businessman and a well-known art collector, the first plein-air was visited by guests from Volgograd, famous artists Gleb Vyatkin and Peter Zverkhovsky.
After plein airs, works, created by artists from different cities, are presented at exhibitions.

The most famous project of the Foundation called the "Jack of Diamonds. PostScriptum” (2012, Volgograd, Russia) was highly appreciated both by the public and by art critics. In this project works of contemporary artists Gleb Vyatkin and Petr Zverkhovsky were compared with the works of the classics of the Russian Avant-Garde art group “Jack of Diamonds” of the early 20th century.
This project was later developed at the exposition of the Saratov State Art Museum by video-composition “Virtual Dialogues”.