The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers continues its series of one-person shows devoted to Soviet nonconformist artists with In the Search of an Absolute: Art of Valery Yurlov, on view through June 3.

“We are very pleased to spotlight these 50 pioneering works, selected from more than 200 by the artist in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection at the Zimmerli,” said director Suzanne Delehanty. Mr. Yurlov stands out as one of the earliest proponents of analytical abstraction within Soviet nonconformist art and was among those artists who, as early as the 1950s, defied the restrictions placed on artists by the Communist government.

Mr. Yurlov, who is based in Moscow, will appear at the Zimmerli’s Art After Hours program on Wednesday, April 4. In addition to a discussion with the artist, the 5 to 9 p.m. evening features an exhibition tour of with associate curator Julia Tulovsky, and a performance of contemporary Russian music by Mason Gross School of the Arts students.

The exhibition focuses on works from the late 1950s and 1960s, with a few later pieces from the collection of the artist. “Valery Yurlov continues the intellectual traditions of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s,” noted Ms. Tulovsky. “However, in order to pursue his artistic journey, he chose to live in a self-imposed exile away from any art community that might drag him into politics.”

Born in 1932 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, near the border with China, Valery Yurlov’s childhood and young adult experiences shaped his lifelong artistic endeavors. As a schoolboy, he had access to a vast library, learning about the lives and practices of the masters in art. During World War II, Russia’s intelligentsia and thousands fleeing the Nazis found refuge in Almaty, creating a rich socio-cultural environment, far from the atmosphere of war in Moscow and Leningrad. Mr. Yurlov’s family befriended many of these dislocated intellectuals. With exposure to a broad range of historical and contemporary philosophies at a relatively young age, Mr. Yurlov began advanced classes at the Almaty Art School, although he was not yet a teenager.

In 1949, Mr. Yurlov entered Moscow Polygraphic Institute, the leading center for the study of book and graphic design, where he was a student of Vladimir Favorsky and Petr Miturich. Both of these teachers preserved the traditions of artistic freedom of the 1920s, which were prohibited by the emergence of Socialist Realism, the art style based on Communist collective propaganda and the only method permitted in the Soviet Union at the time. They covertly taught their students that the most important considerations in creating art are form, texture, composition, and structure – not the ideological subject matter supported by the official doctrine. They encouraged independent artistic thinking and gave their students absolute creative freedom, another risky endeavor at the time.

The legacy of his teachers manifested itself in Mr. Yurlov’s life-long search for an “absolute,” or a form, constructed in accordance with universal principles. As early as 1959, Mr. Yurlov began experimenting with the concept of a “para-form,” or a pair of forms, which has significantly defined his artistic path. Throughout his career, he has explored and continues to analyze the endless possibilities of para-forms and their interrelationships, ranging from harmony to conflict. Duality, the union of opposites that underlies the universe, constitutes the deeper meaning of Mr. Yurlov’s paintings, drawings, and reliefs.

Although Mr. Yurlov incorporated the latest developments and theories in contemporary art – such as neo-constructivism, structuralism, impermanence, and even performance art – he continued to work outside established circles of artists and stayed beyond the confines of politics. He made his living as a freelance illustrator during school and for much of his adult life, allowing him to live outside of Moscow and freely develop his own artistic language.

This exhibition is curated by Ms. Tulovsky with assistance by Olena Martynyuk and Corina Apostol, graduate students in the Department of Art History and Dodge Fellows at the Zimmerli Art Museum. Most of the works are drawn from the museum’s 20,000-piece Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art, the largest and most comprehensive collection of Soviet dissident art from the historical Cold War period between 1956 and 1986.

For more information on the Zimmerli, call (732) 932.7237, ext. 610 or visit the museum’s website at www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu.