Ural is the zone of original and unique art activity. The project “Development Zone” is the result of a two-year collaboration between Yekaterinburg Gallery of Modern Art and Erarta Museum in St. Petersburg. It brings together artists of different generations and styles, but same creative mindset: all of them break the boundaries of the ordinary.

Evgeny Malakhin, the first Yekaterinburg street artist and one of the most interesting figures at the show, is an excellent example. He turns ordinary trash into aesthetic objects, and “mistakes” of photo development into powerful artistic means.

Yekaterinburg is not the only important location on the Ural’s art map. Another significant cultural center is Nizhny Tagil, the capital of Ural’s neo-avant-garde. The key artist of Nizhny Tagil is Aleksey Konstantinov whose neoplasticism takes a new look at the ideas of Kandinsky, Filonov, and Malevich.

Speaking about the South Ural, such cities as Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk have not yet developed strong traditions and remain a zone of constant searches and experiments. Victoria Pitirimova and Anatoly Baratynsky mix photography and graphics printing; Alexander Danilov’s graphic art combines primitivistic simplicity of materials and mathematical precision of laser technologies.

The Ural is a place of its own rich mythology, which again and again becomes the subject of reflection for local artists. Zoya Lebedeva, an artist from Izhevsk, reinterprets the Finno-Ugric tradition of weaving: having invented the author’s technique, she weaves symbolic art objects out of herbs and flowers.

A designer from Chelyabinsk Anna Pitirimova takes the topic of not-accidental impact of the Chelyabinsk meteorite and makes posters-“simulacra” of her private relationships with the universe.

“Iron Curtain”, the series of light objects by the Yekaterinburg art group “Zlye”, seeks to destroy the world’s stereotypes and taboos of the official ideology of the "industrial-defense" region and interact with the real world.

The exhibition features all possible trends of contemporary media practices: graffiti, video performance, concept-, photo- and video art, and animation. Ural contemporary art is represented by such well-known artists as Stanislav Rikshavkovets, Vladimir Abikh, Egor Mayer, Ksenia Larina, Natalya Chernyshova, Nicholai Fedoreev, Igor Shurov, Vladimir Seleznev, Sergei Laushkin, Sergei Bryukhanov, Vladimir Nasedkin, Evgeni Cherepanov, Alexei Aliev and Denis Tevekov.