Territory of Freedom. Nonconformists in Tarusa

On November 19, AZ Museum will present the exhibition “Territory of Freedom. Nonconformists in Tarusa”, the second part of a project exploring Tarusa's role in the history of twentieth-century Russian culture. The exhibition focuses on artists of the postwar generation whose lives and artistic practices became closely associated with Tarusa and the unofficial art scene from the late 1950s onwards. The exhibition will bring together more than 70 works by Anatoly Zverev, Eduard Steinberg, Boris Sveshnikov, Dmitry Plavinsky, Igor Vulokh, Valentin Vorobyov, and others. It will place the work of Tarusa's nonconformist artists in a broader historical context.

The first part of the project was the prologue exhibition “Beyond the 101st Kilometer. Nonconformists in Tarusa”, held in the summer of 2026 at the House of Writers in Tarusa. The exhibition explored the early history of the Tarusa artistic circle and the “first free exhibition of contemporary art,” held at the town's House of Culture in 1961. It featured more than 40 works by Boris Sveshnikov, Vladimir Pyatnitsky, Eduard and Borukh Steinberg, Anatoly Zverev, Vladimir Yakovlev, Igor Vulokh, Mikhail Grobman, Valentin Vorobyov, Dmitry Plavinsky, Alexander Kharitonov, and Alexei Paustovsky, drawn from the AZ Museum collection and private collections. The third part of the project will take place at the AZART Center for Contemporary Art in 2027.

The project is curated by Elena Kamenskaya and Natalia Volkova. The project consultant is Oksana Savoskul, co-founder of the Tarusa Heritage Charitable Foundation. The exhibition is designed by Alexey Podkidyshev.