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By Lindsay Pollock

Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) — Financier J. Ezra Merkin’s $310 million collection of Mark Rothko paintings, sold earlier this year to a mystery buyer, will be exhibited at Moscow’s new Garage Center for Contemporary Culture next spring.

Merkin is facing a lawsuit by Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General, who accuses Merkin and Gabriel Capital Corp. of secretly placing $2.4 billion of client funds with Bernard Madoff, who ran the largest Ponzi scheme ever. Madoff is serving a 150-year sentence for directing the fraud. Merkin previously owned the world’s largest private collection of Rothko paintings.

The Garage is an exhibition venue founded last year in a 1926 former bus depot by Russian collector Dasha Zhukova and her billionaire partner Roman Abramovich.

Show organizers Marc Glimcher, of the New York gallery PaceWildenstein, and Garage International Coordinator Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst said Abramovich doesn’t own the artworks. They declined to name the owner.

“It’s one of those beautiful stories,” said Glimcher, seated on a bench at London’s Frieze art fair. “There is one cohesive collection that tells the whole story of Rothko’s mature work, and it was all together, and it changed hands.” The new owner “was presented with this story and the response was absolutely,” he said about arranging the show.

The exhibition will be Rothko’s first solo show in Moscow. The Russian-born artist rose to fame in the U.S. among a group of postwar Abstract Expressionist painters. He committed suicide in 1970.

Record Rothko

David Rockefeller sold Rothko’s “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender Rose)” for a record $72.8 million at Sotheby’s in New York at the peak of the recent art market in May, 2007 to an anonymous buyer.

The Garage has recently hosted exhibitions of works by London-based sculptor Antony Gormley and highlights from the collection of French billionaire and Christie’s owner Francois Pinault.

Merkin had displayed his Rothko collection in his Park Avenue apartment. He acquired his art from 2003 to 2008, buying a group of seven works for about $90 million from Rothko’s heirs. That sale was brokered by the New York gallery PaceWildenstein, which represents the Rothko estate.

Cuomo, who had frozen Merkin’s assets, approved the sale of Merkin’s collection. Proceeds were placed in escrow pending the outcome of a lawsuit linked to Merkin’s investments with Madoff.

To contact the reporter on the story: Lindsay Pollock in New York at lindsaypollock@yahoo.com;