Eduard Anikonov was born in a Russian steel-making town of Magnitogorsk in 1966. He began learning painting at an early age when his parents took him to a local Art School for children. From 1983 to 1987 he studied fine arts at the College of Arts in Sverdlovsk (Ekatherinburg). In 1991 Anikonov entered the faculty of graphics of one of the most prominent art schools of Russia - St. Petersburg Repin Academy of Arts after achieving the highest score at his entrance exam.

The neighborhood of the giant steelmaking factory made a special impression on the artist in his childhood. It was obvious that he was a product of his time in many ways. As any other Soviet boy he saw movies and read books about great construction projects, heroic labor exploits and about taming of the great rivers and deserts. The huge blast furnaces and dusty titanic work shops stretching for miles, shop windows covered with soot, and dozens and dozens of smoke stacks did not impress the young artist with their architectural forms though they did strike him with their incredible sizes. And besides all that there was young industrial art. Hundreds of artists from all corners of Russia were creating chronicles of the birth and daily labor of the greatest steel mill in the nation. Being a product of the industrial age of the USSR, the industrial genre happened to become an unwanted stepchild for the Soviet fine arts.

Twinkling with patterns and secret meanings, intriguing and never revealing itself to the full, Anikonov's art carries you away with its powerful and spectacular appeal as if protesting against the drab routine of the industrial giant. His early works are balancing on the edge of symbolism and experiment, tradition and exotica, of the material and the ephemeral thus creating an effect of diverse, often fantastic textures and quasi-sounds. The imagery is vivid and revealing. That kind of art irritated many Russian philistines used to the traditional genres. In the early period Anikonov represents the author who uses the language of symbols and hidden meanings.

When the time of freedom and permissiveness in art began to thin out as well as did the genre itself, Anikonov returned to his childhood impressions and the roots of his home town. He found a good opportunity to express his artistic potential in the industrial theme - the tracer marks of the palette knife or a thin brush that are breaking the vast monochrome space; the numbers and letters coming out through the painted surface render Anikonov's complex emotions and ideas.

Eduard Anikonov's work lies in the realm of contemporary topics. The essential life in the Ural industrial belt shows itself well in Anikonov's industrial series. The laconic language used by the artist matches the way an ordinary Soviet person used to take life. Though labor always took the main place in human life in Russia Anikonov managed to show a whole unknown layer in the seemingly familiar life. Here belong the grim workshops and roaring rolling mills, the gloomy iron ore mines and dark quarries that are far from being festive or picturesque. Depicting steelworker's labor is totally bereft of heroic or romantic halo that is why it is taken by the spectators as part of their everyday life. Things that look like great deeds to a layman were routine things for factory workers.

The goal of reflecting prosaic life in a new way in art is rather difficult to reach. There is not a trace of officially accepted "labor victories" or "red letter day's reports" on Anikonov's canvasses. The color palette of his paintings is fairly modest: it is a strong masculine world whose heroes are men of deed and the technological schedule who are basically taken as "pillars of the nation".

The melting of modern art into the life of an industrial enterprise gives us a chance to reassess the concept of Magnitogorsk through its main symbolic component - Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. The artists seems to set a countdown for a new saga and a new reality, for the new perception of the familiar industrial scene. For the spectator he offers a chance of real involvement and empathy.

Eduard Anikonov took part in exhibitions in art galleries of Moscow, St.Petersburg, Samara, Yekaterinburg, London, Vienna, San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey and his hometown - Magnitogorsk.