Anatoly Viktorovich Zhukov was born in Moscow in 1937. In 1944, his family moved to Kostroma, where he entered the Kostroma Art School, but continued education at the Krupskaya Moscow People’s University of Arts for Correspondence Students. He graduated from the institute in 1967.

The art of Anatoly Zhukov is closely tied to non-objective art, or abstract art — an artistic movement that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the main driving forces of abstract artists was the desire to abandon depicting any real-life object in painting. Their works depicted combinations of lines, geometric shapes, textures and color spots.

Zhukov said:

For many years, Anatoly Zhukov expressed his worldview through abstract painting, however, his passion for this kind of art did not appear immediately. At the beginning of his career, he considered himself to be a devoted realist.

As time went on, his creative worldview was enriched, his horizons expanded, and the artist came to the conclusion that “when working only from nature, it is not always possible to express what is sitting in the subconscious”. It was then that his experiments and artistic pursuits began.

Vladislav Mikhailovich Grachev was another famous Kostroma abstract artist and like-minded friend of Anatoly Zhukov. His aesthetic ideals seriously influenced Zhukov’s work. Zhukov expressed his gratitude to his friend and attributed his successes in art to their friendship.