Irina Zatulovskaya. Living

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents Living, a retrospective exhibition of Irina Zatulovskaya, one of the key figures on the Russian contemporary art scene. This project charts her entire creative journey, from early works to mature experiments, from national folklore to classical narratives. The project's architecture is designed by Kirill Ass and Nadezhda Korbut, who have extensive experience of collaborating with Irina.

This large-scale exhibition will immerse the audience in Irina’s artistic world. Rather than a chronological layout, the rooms are organised with the typological principle in mind, featuring themes that Irina Zatulovskaya revisited in her practice over decades. The first room is about childhood, images of the mother and memories of the early years. The second one is about growing up, the student days and the first creative breakthrough. Subsequent rooms present works with diverse artistic and historical contexts, where paintings are displayed alongside embroidery, frescoes, graphics and found objects. Like a book index, the exhibition identifies the central chapters in Zatulovskaya's practice and invites audiences to explore her accents, punctuations and pauses.

Featuring more than 300 works in various media, the exhibition offers a multifaceted interpretation of Zatulovskaya's legacy showing how she organically interweaves personal experience, cultural memory and living art forms. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue exploring the key themes and narratives of her decades-long career.

About the artist

Irina Zatulovskaya (b. 1954) is one of the most original authors of her generation. For decades, she has cultivated a unique artistic mythology that merges diverse cultural layers, national as well as global. Her practice embraces a vast array of media, incorporating everything from dilapidated panels and ancient potsherds to portraits of 19th-century writers and Modernist artists, as well as fragments of everyday material culture and folklore.

Irina began drawing and writing poetry as a child. She later studied at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the Children's Art School on Krasnaya Presnya. From 1971 to 1976, she trained at the Polygraphic Institute, specializing in book art. She joined the Moscow Union of Artists in 1979 and was awarded the prestigious Master Prize in 2004. Her art has been presented through more than 50 solo exhibitions in major cultural capitals worldwide, including London, Milan, Moscow, Nairobi, Paris, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Helsinki. Her works are held in 30 Russian and European museum collections, such as the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Russian Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), Museo delle Trame Mediterranee (Gibellina, Sicily), as well as in numerous private collections around the world.