He is a noteworthy representative of the second generation post-war Russian Avant-garde, the author of collages and objects, and one of the first consistent "abstract artists" in the USSR. 1992 saw Valery Yurlov's first solo exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery. His works have been sold at the international auctions of Sotheby's and Christies. His sixty plus creative years have encompassed the Khrushchev Thaw and the Era of Stagnation, Perestroika, the period he lived in America, and his return to Russia. About 200 of Yurlov's works are in the Zimmerli Museum of Fine Arts in New Brunswick (State of New Jersey, USA).

The artist's works are in private and museum collections, including the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Centre for Contemporary Art (Russia), the museum of Contemporary Art "Art4" (Russia), the Zimmerli Museum (USA), and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (USA), Hasid Museum (USA). During a ten-year stay in America (1994-2003), Valery Yurlov had 6 solo exhibitions and participated in many others at embassies and universities in the country.

The purport of the concept "a pair of forms" is the depiction of two states of an object: one is the original, and the other is that same object changed, whether it be by time or the environment. Yurlov demonstrated these principles in a series of unique photo projects of the 1960s, which depict a whole and then bitten apple, a whole and then broken bottle. In his works Yurlov explores various compositional structures, the relationship between Man and Reality, Man and the Cosmos, their concord and conflicts, shows their harmonious and complementary nature. The wholeness of opposites – the figurative and abstract, Euclidean geometry and other dimensions, number and progression – is understood in the constant dialogue of the artist's images.

Valery Yurlov, an innovator and experimenter in the Art of the 1950-60s, has always striven to uncover and depict something new in observed phenomena. Akin to Ilya Kabakov, another Moscow conceptualist, Yurlov devised his own language – an alphabet of geometric forms, such as "Pairs of Forms", the "Trinity" sign, and the "I See Myself" method.