Valery Yurlov is one of the few artists of the 1960s generation still active on the Russian art scene today. The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow is staging a major retrospective of one of the few remaining pioneers of post-war abstraction.

At 93 Valery Yurlov (b. 1932) does not look his age. At the opening of his solo exhibition ‘Experiences of Mental Vision’ curated by Irina Gorlova and Igor Volkov at the Tretyakov in Moscow, he stood for two hours giving interviews. He showed me energetically around his exhibition, pointing to works he made seven decades ago, hanging next to more recent ones. He designed the layout himself micromanaging the museum staff throughout. Yurlov did not always date his works, but it is clear he became interested in abstraction early on in his career, starting to experiment with it when he was only nineteen under the influence of Pavel Zakharov (1902–1984), who had directly absorbed the radical achievements of the avant-garde while studying at the short-lived VKHUTEMAS art school in the 1920s.

Born in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), then the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, Yurlov moved to Moscow in 1949 to enroll at the Polygraphic Institute, where Zakharov was one of his mentors, along with several other VKHUTEMAS alumni. He graduated from the book illustration department in 1955, in the early days of Khrushchev's thaw, when ideological restrictions on art were beginning to ease, although the avant-garde was still banned.

Yurlov himself is skeptical of the Russian avant-garde tradition. “I don't like Malevich, because his works are pure geometry,” he told me candidly. “I prefer Mondrian, because he built his works from real experience, not just from inside his head. Their structure is modelled on the branches of a tree”. Yurlov’s early figurative paintings in the show, such as self-portraits and a female nude show the influence of European modernism. However, he quickly distanced himself from it and did not join any art groups or movements. In his later work there is an analytical, almost scientific approach based on endless comparisons. Over the years he developed the same themes and would work on a series for decades, notably ‘Pair of Forms’, ‘Counterforms’, ‘To Be In’ and ‘It Was – It Is’.

The title of the exhibition includes the term ‘Mental Vision’, which aptly describes his method. Yurlov lives in a universe of pure forms, somewhat evoking ideas of Plato. “In Russia, plastic art is not well understood,” he observes. “People do not generally appreciate pure form and they do not understand that a circle or a diamond shape can be beautiful in itself. They are used to thinking that everything has to be a symbol standing for something else”. For Yurlov, his creative process is always a journey of discovery: “When I start working on a piece of art, I have nothing but my experience and my mental vision, and when I finish it, I am often surprised – the colour and the shape work by themselves”.

He captures these ideal forms in reality in his photographs or reconstructs them from material objects in his collages and installations. In the ‘Pair of Forms’ series, he chooses two forms and tries to create a dialogue between them. “You and I are different, but we are both human, with a mouth, a nose and so on. So it is with forms,” he explains. In ‘Counterforms’ he focuses on opposites rather than similarities. His approach has much in common with philosophy and even theology – it is no coincidence that one of his favourite works is an unrealised project of chapels for the Vatican, which he once offered to Pope John Paul II. The models, made from coloured Plexiglas, are scattered throughout the exhibition. In them, Yurlov sought to change the nature of the space, lending it a new spiritual dimension through light and colour.

Speaking of one of his models, he says, “it should reflect everything around it, nature must enter it – it cannot be just an empty space”. In the series ‘It Was – It Is’, the artist shows the transformation and the constancy of change, which he observes in the world around him with the detached eye of a documentary photographer. His still-lifes seem more austere and scientific than poetic: two apples, whole and bitten, two glasses, empty and full, are captured on black-and-white film to be preserved forever, transferred to the world of pure, eternal forms. In ‘To Be In’ he attempts to deconstruct form, to explore the existence of one form within another. Early in his career, his desire to uncover the fundamental structures underlying the visual world led him close to what is now a field called Art & Science. For example, he created collages that detailed the mechanism of a car or other technical equipment. “Now, after many decades, I realize that collages have become a direct route for me to non-figurative art,” he says.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, state museums changed their attitude what were once outsiders – the underground artists. Yurlov had a solo exhibition at the Tretyakov in 1992, and many of his works were acquired for the museum’s collection. The following year he moved to New York where he lived for a decade. Norton Dodge, the renowned American patron of Soviet underground art, acquired his works for his collection, which was later bequeathed to the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Yurlov's first solo exhibition in New York took place at the Berman Gallery in 1994, and five more followed. Yurlov took part in many group exhibitions in America and Europe but always maintained his ties with Russia and finally decided to return to Moscow in 2003. For the most part, he remained on the fringes of the Russian art scene, continuing to work on the same series he had begun in the 1960s. A major solo exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow in 2022 reminded the public of his existence. It seems that today, when most nonconformist artists have died or emigrated, his work is attracting more and more attention – a remnant of an almost sunken Atlantis. His current retrospective at the Tretyakov is a monument to artistic endurance.