On 27 November the AZ/ART Centre for Contemporary Art on Maroseyka will open the exhibition "And in the Steppe the Wind Is Raging…", marking the 90th anniversary of the birth of the artist Vladimir Yakovlev (1934–1998)

The exhibition will include 70 works from the collections of the AZ Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Sergei Alexandrov, Nikolai Kotrelev, Mikhail Alshibaya, the artist's family and others. The project will present the principal strands of Yakovlev's work: abstractions, flowers and portraits created in the 1950s to 1970s.

Several works will be shown to the public for the first time, among them pieces from private collections and three paintings from the Tretyakov Gallery: "Composition. Rain, Sun" (1959), "Non-Objective Composition" (1958–1959), and the 1950s masterpiece "Head", which will be shown for the first time since its restoration, carried out by Valery Silayev, one of the project's curators.

Natalia Opaleva, Director General of the AZ Museum and the AZ/ART Centre for Contemporary Art, says: "Vladimir Yakovlev is one of the most important artists not only of our collection but of the whole of unofficial Moscow art in the second half of the twentieth century. Even in his lifetime he was highly valued by fellow artists, and some called him a genius. In the year of Vladimir Yakovlev's 90th anniversary we are opening on Maroseyka a museum exhibition of his works, chosen by the curators according to a definite principle: flowers and faces. Both, in Yakovlev, bear at once the stamp of tragedy and the hope of something better."

Vladimir Yakovlev appeared on the art scene in the late 1950s, when, on the wave of the "Thaw", contemporary art was shown in Moscow. After the exhibitions of European and American painting held in 1957–1961, Yakovlev developed his own unique creative method. He moved away from tachiste abstraction towards pure, luminous portraits and "portraits of flowers", which will be shown at the AZ/ART gallery.

The curators of the project are Natalya Volkova, Chief Curator of the AZ Museum, the collector Sergei Alexandrov, and Valery Silayev, Head of Department at the Tretyakov Gallery.