Irina Korina

The Artist and her Works

Irina Korina was born in 1977 in Moscow, Russia where she also lives and works today.

“When the Trees are Big”
Irina Korina studied at the GITIS – the Russian Theatre Academy as well as studying art at the Valand de Gotebord Fine Arts Academy in Sweden and the Kunstakademie in Vienna. She’s already participated in numerous international exhibits with her work being notably appreciated at the 2008 Venise Biennale (Russian pavilion).

In discovering all her installations and sculptures created since 2000, one can highlight many formal expressive return trips between the works without systematicism, repetition or deflection of identical motifs.

One of the common points is however this constant investment of the “monument-form”: based on what criteria can a building, a sculpture or an object be qualified as a monument? Irina Korina makes the relationship to time, space and history compared to the object and its base, the principal matter of her installations and sculptures by using deceptively kitsch and pop recycled materials. Indeed, her works are often closer to poetic inventions in the strange and creative proximity to objects and materials. Futurologia (2010), exhibited inside museums is therefore the combination of lights, opaque white panels which surround a tree trunk from whence blossom original branches.

At the MAC/VAL, they are tree stumps which – according to your viewpoint and relationship chosen between outside and inside – are irrigated, fed or constrained, emptied of their sap by this “artificial limb” a corolla made from plastic water bottles. The tree stumps are the foundations and roots of old metal logos whose original functional contexts are unknown reinforcing the synthesis between the obsolete, the absurd but also the capacity for any logo to be given a new meaning. According to Irina Korina, “trees are like neutral and eternal witnesses.”