Irina Zatulovskaya (Moscow, 1954) has had a career marked by expulsion—she was removed from the Union of Soviet Artists in 1979 for a portrait deemed “non-conformist,” considered a misrepresentation of the Soviet individual. This event led Zatulovskaya to a radical asceticism of material.
At Galleria 200C in Venice, on the island of Giudecca, her solo exhibition Sacred Spring, curated by Olga Strada and Anna Sartor, presents the outcome of a residency in the lagoon where this asceticism has coalesced into a preference for fabric, which serves as her primary reagent.
To understand Zatulovskaya’s work, we must step back and abandon the notion of a surface as a “screen,” instead beginning to perceive it as a “body.” Since the 1980s, the artist has eschewed canvas, viewing it as an artificial blankness, a support that is too “beautiful” and therefore morally unsuitable for depicting the roughness of reality. She has taken refuge in rusted iron, reclaimed wood, plywood, and other discarded materials.
It is here that her research intersects with the aesthetics of Moscow Conceptualism, but with a uniquely mystical twist. While for the Italian Arte Povera movement, the object was pure energy, for Zatulovskaya, it is silent memory: a universe where the legacy of the Avant-garde, the neo-primitivism of Larionov and Goncharova, and the Russian icon tradition coexist on supports stripped of their original functionality.
For the exhibition at Galleria 200C, she utilizes fabrics of various origins: fragments of Venetian textiles that become supports for a synthetic painting, almost childlike in its brutal precision. The “poor” material is no longer a limitation but an ethical condition. By adopting discarded elements, the artist makes a moral choice, compelling the viewer to observe reality through the prism of virtue and truth, rejecting beauty that is not rooted in the honesty of matter consumed by time.
Zatulovskaya’s Sacred Spring, despite a title evoking pagan rites and violent rebirths, is not celebratory; rather, it is a secular exhibition. The works, imbued with an intimately religious vision of existence, do not seek mimesis but the extreme synthesis of primary form. In a city like Venice, saturated with historical layers and often imprisoned by its own image, Zatulovskaya’s work acts through subtraction.
As Anna Sartor emphasizes: “By adopting discarded materials, Zatulovskaya not only expresses the freedom to break away from forms that have already served their purpose (blank canvases) but also makes a moral choice: it is not so much the aesthetic element that is emphasized, but the ethical element from which the artist compels us to observe reality through the prism of virtue and truth, without which beauty is not possible.”
