“Rebels at the Edge. Contemporary Art in Vladivostok. 1960–2000s” exhibition project features works both by the young artists, and those who predestined the emergence and growth of conceptual and unofficial art in Vladivostok.

The development of Vladivostok art scene was accelerated by the advent of the Maritime Art Gallery and Art School in the 1940s, and the Academy of Arts in the 1960s. Its non-academic character was primarily connected to the emergence of such galleries as “Art Etage”, “Arka” and “Portmay”. The current exhibition aims to retrace the evolution of Vladivostok art from formal to critical preferences over the twentieth century.

In 2013 Alexander Lobychev published a monograph about Russian Far Eastern art, and in 2015 Natalya Levdanskaya defended a thesis on the neo-modernist and post-modernist fine arts trends in Primorye of the late ХХ – early ХХI centuries. These publications can be fairly considered the starting point of the regional history of contemporary art and the prerequisite for the present project.

The exhibition presents paintings, drawings, videos, installations and photographs by more than twenty artists from Vladivostok, featuring such authors as Victor Fedorov, Alexander Pyrkov, Alexander Kiryakhno, Fedor Morozov, Gennady Omelchenko, Yuri Sobchenko, Mikhail Pavin, Ilyas Zinatulin and many others.

“If the capital nonconformist art has been highly talked and written about over the recent years, studying of the provincial underground is still in the initial stage. The objective of the exhibition is not just to introduce the new names to art historians, but also to show the art evolution of the whole Primorye region from the weak informal searches of the 1960s to the broad palette of neo-modernist statements of the late XX and early XXI centuries”, — said the art historian Natalya Levdanskaya.

The exhibition is organized by the ZARYA Center for Contemporary Art in collaboration with with Arka Gallery, The Primorye State Picture Gallery and Artetage Museum of Contemporary Art. Most of the works are kindly provided by Arka Gallery, The Primorye State Picture Gallery and private collectors.