Vladimir Panteleimonovich Muravyov (1924–2006) belonged to a generation of artists whose feeding ground was the culture of the post-war era. It was a time of an alternative perspective of the past and the future, a time that gave rise to hopes for freedom and spiritual rebirth.

Despite the feeling of breaking through ideological pressure, during the 1960s — the period of the Khrushchev thaw — socialist realism was still the only officially recognized artistic genre in the Soviet Union. Socialist realism confined the artist into depicting exactly what the state wanted, and propaganda of an idealized image of a communist society was one of those things.

The Soviet government stood guard over ideological norms and continued fighting against dissenting opinions and individuality. The spiritual crisis, caused by the depreciation of modernity, led the representatives of unofficial art, among whom was Vladimir Muravyov, to turn to internal horizons.

In his work, the artist tried to understand the complex multi-layered nature of man. He exposed the things people prefer to hide away and therefore deny about themselves, such as brutality, aggression, and sexual cravings, because they see such things as morally reprehensible.

In his work, Muravyov personified these instincts in exaggerated images of monsters, bogeymen, freaks, who usually hide away behind a shell of external decency. These humanoid characters shock the viewer with their external ugliness and hideousness, while at the same time making them admire the perfection of the painterly aspect.

Focusing on one or another human mask or social grimace, the artist placed his characters in a space devoid of the realities of time, and space. By doing so he pointed at the universal character of the problems and phenomena he seeked to unravel. It is as if the artist, with the slyness of a philosopher, argued that just as “there is no ugliness in nature” created by the Creator, so can there be no ugliness in the world created by the artist.