At Galleria 200C Giudecca opens Primavera Sacra, a solo exhibition by Irina Zatulovskaya curated by Olga Strada and Anna Sartor, on view until 4 May 2026. The project originates from an artist residency organised by the Venetian gallery and presents a group of recent works conceived for this occasion.
An artist and poet active on the Moscow art scene since the 1980s, Zatulovskaya has developed a practice rooted in the representation of everyday life, combining the legacy of the Russian avant-garde with the experiments of nonconformist artists and the traditions of icon painting and folk art. Trained within the so-called Moscow School of Cézannists, in the 1980s she made a decisive shift, abandoning canvas in favour of humble materials – iron, wood, stone and discarded objects deprived of their original function – which became central to her compositions. Her work is often associated with Russian neo-primitivism and resonates with the artistic experiments of Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and Kazimir Malevich. In these works, everyday materials acquire symbolic and metaphysical value, bringing her research close to the aesthetics of Moscow Conceptualism and, in some respects, to the experiments of Arte Povera.
For the Venetian exhibition, the artist has created a series of works using fabrics of different origins, some of them Venetian. As Anna Sartor notes, the use and display of humble materials represents for Zatulovskaya not only an aesthetic choice but also an ethical one: abandoning the canvas – perceived as an excessively perfect support – becomes a way of confronting reality through objects marked by use and time. In this transformation of discarded matter, the creative gesture restores a symbolic and spiritual dimension to the material, echoing the reflections of the philosopher and mathematician Pavel Florensky on the tradition of icon painting.
