The Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts has opened ‘Two Avant-Gardes’ and ‘Above the Avant-Garde’, a two-part exhibition project conceived and realised in collaboration with private collector Anton Kozlov. Dmitry Smolev of ‘The Art Newspaper Russia’ visited to discover whether the exhibitions fulfil their promise.

The concepts of the avant-garde and non-objectivity are not synonymous. Yet, historically, when the artistic experiments of the early twentieth century are invoked, the names most readily brought to mind are Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), El Lissitzky (1890–1941), Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), and Olga Rozanova (1886–1918) – in other words, those artists who understood the new art above all as a language of abstract form. These figures, along with other avant-gardists of the “first wave”, form the backbone of Two Avant-Gardes, their works drawn from the permanent collection of the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts.

Alongside them appear works by artists of the following generation, usually described as non-conformists. Some exhibits are drawn from the museum’s own collection – including paintings by Ely Belyutin (1925–2012) and works on paper by Vladimir Yankilevsky (1938–2018) – but the greater part comes from Anton Kozlov’s holdings. The special project ‘Above the Avant-Garde’, devoted to art made after 2000, is drawn entirely from that private collection. Together, the two exhibitions map the intersections, divergences, and lesser-known paths of Russian non-objective art over more than a century.

Even so, there is both logic and resonance in these juxtapositions. “I see this project as a conversation between a grandfather, his son, and then his grandson,” Anton Kozlov said at the press preview. “Both son and grandson have since become independent and accomplished a great deal in life. Their exchange contains jokes and disagreements, but it is, above all, a conversation between equals.” It is worth noting that this is not the first time Kozlov, who has been energetically building his contemporary art collection over the past seven years, has brought works from it to Ekaterinburg, although previous presentations were organised without museum collaboration.

The structure and content of the first room of ‘Two Avant-Gardes’ were discussed with ‘The Art Newspaper Russia’ by Olga Gornung, co-curator of the project and head of the museum’s department of Russian and international art. “In addressing the first Russian avant-garde, our task in this project was to present specifically its non-objective dimension. Works of this kind from the museum’s collection have been distributed across various sections – ‘Painterly Abstraction’, ‘Cubo-Futurism’, ‘Suprematism’, and ‘Non-Objective Art’ – and into this structure we have introduced individual works by representatives of the ‘second avant-garde’, to use a term coined by artist Mikhail Grobman. These are works that in one way or another rhyme with those of their predecessors, existing in dialogue with them, even if they were not created under their direct influence. Thus, alongside Wassily Kandinsky’s famous ‘Grey Oval’ are placed works by Boris Turetsky, Ely Belyutin, and Boris Otarov. Their paintings echo Kandinsky’s composition, although these artists were in fact responding more directly to the painterly expressionism of American artists, who themselves were partly influenced by Kandinsky.”

Direct lines of influence, however, were not absent. “Many Russian non-conformists were, as they say, only one handshake away from the first avant-garde,” Olga Gornung goes on. “Ely Belyutin, for instance, studied under Aristarkh Lentulov. One might also recall Vladimir Nemukhin, who regarded his true teacher as Pyotr Sokolov, whose 1920 ‘Non-Objective Composition’ from the museum’s collection is included in the exhibition. Nemukhin was for a time married to Lydia Masterkova, whose ‘Composition on a Red-Yellow Ground’ of 1960, from Anton Kozlov’s collection, also appears here. There were, naturally, many other links and conversations. It is surely no coincidence that Igor Chelkovski’s sculptural constructions sit so convincingly in the exhibition space beside the painterly Cubo-Futurism of Nadezhda Udaltsova and Nathan Pevzner. Chelkovski, as is well known, was the founder of the journal A–Ya, on whose pages the avant-garde effectively returned from oblivion.”

Here one is reminded of the recent Moscow exhibition ‘Path to the Avant-Garde’, organised by the Zotov Centre together with the AZ Museum. Built around publications from the Paris journal A–Ya, edited by Igor Chelkovski (b. 1937), it announced a theme close to that of the present Ekaterinburg project: the ways in which the “second avant-garde” absorbed and reworked the experience of the “first.” The exhibition at the Ekaterinburg Museum, however, has arrived at a rather different result.

Galina Shubina, an independent Moscow-based researcher of Russian contemporary art and another co-curator of the project, explained the curatorial logic behind this approach: “After the first room, where selected works from the two avant-gardes are placed in direct dialogue, the exhibition unfolds across four sections devoted to the development of unofficial Soviet art. Our chronology extends from the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students to 1987, the period of perestroika, by which time unofficial art had effectively exhausted its earlier function as an alternative to the official canon.” For Shubina, it was essential to show that the traditions of the avant-garde were inherited not literally, but in more complex and mediated ways. “To tackle this task fully, one would need to draw on the collections of many museums,” she noted. “We, however, are working with only two collections, and on that basis we have sought to convey the complex structure of the unofficial artistic milieu, made up of practitioners with very different creative approaches. We see non-objectivity – both as a method and as a phenomenon – as the unifying idea that ran through their work.”

Non-objectivity serves here not only as a unifying principle, but at times also as a point of division, marking differences in artistic method and even in worldview. Abstraction could function as a field of intense, impassioned self-expression, as in the case of Lydia Masterkova (1927–2008), or as a site for analytical experiment at the intersection of art and science, as in Yury Zlotnikov’s (1930–2016) sheets from the ‘Signal System’ series. It could also operate as a constructive means of engaging with metaphysics, as in the work of Francisco Infante (b. 1943) and other artists associated with the ‘Dvizhenie’ [Movement] group. Elsewhere, non-objectivity became a means of “self-purification” from all that was extraneous, as exemplified by the abstract canvases of Valery Gerlovin (b. 1945), highly uncharacteristic within his broader practice. For the conceptualists, meanwhile, abstraction was valued above all as a mechanism for defamiliarising reality, as can be seen in the work of Irina Nakhova (b. 1955), Viktor Pivovarov (b. 1937), and Ivan Chuikov (1935–2020). These examples represent only a portion of the non-conformist strategies of engaging with non-objectivity on view in ‘Two Avant-Gardes’.

“As for the exhibition of works created in our 21st century,” Galina Shubina explains, “the idea of staging it arose later, when we were already working on the project. The museum expressed a wish to expand the exhibition, but it was important for us not to overstep the chronological boundaries established from the outset. In the end, a special project emerged, placed one floor above, on what is known as the mezzanine. Hence the title “Above the Avant-Garde.”

Anton Kozlov’s collection possesses considerable resources when it comes to contemporary art, though this would seem not so much to have simplified the work on the special project as to have made it more demanding. Within a limited space, it was necessary to present works that would signal important tendencies, resonate in one way or another with those shown on the floor below, and at the same time assert vivid individual qualities of their own. Any comprehensive survey was out of the question from the outset; nevertheless, this post-millennial cross-section of the “new non-objectivity” has emerged as both striking and well judged. The groups MishMash and Blue Noses, alongside Mikhail Dobrovolsky (b. 1994), Pyotr Kiryusha (b. 1978), Vladimir Logutov (b. 1980), Pakhom (b. 1966), Roman Sakin (b. 1976), David Ter-Oganyan (b. 1981), and the recently deceased Anna Zholud (1981–2025), fulfil perfectly well the role of those very “grandchildren” – with all the contradictions towards their “fathers” and “grandfathers” that such a role inevitably entails.

As Galina Shubina observes: “Advancing in steps of half a century, we return to the dialogue between generations initiated in ‘Two Avant-Gardes’, and once again the unifying principle is the language of non-objective art, deeply embedded in contemporary culture. Today’s artists once more turn to the legacy of the avant-garde, but view it through the prism of the experience of earlier generations, giving rise to a whole spectrum of relations to this tradition – from the reception of the avant-garde as an intellectual breakthrough to its ironic deconstruction.”

One final point, and not an unimportant one: the project’s theme as a whole may unsettle or even discourage some viewers by seeming overly rarefied or conceptually dense. Yet it should be said that the organisers have made a deliberate effort to achieve the greatest possible clarity. The result may not be quite as simple as two plus two, but neither does it demand higher mathematics. The viewer need only take half a step towards the curators’ interpretive framework for the exhibition to begin yielding its meanings without undue difficulty.

This article was first published in Russian on the website of The Art Newspaper Russia on 27 February 2026.