Irina Zatulovskaya's "Sacred Spring" Exhibition at Venice's Galleria 200C

Irina Zatulovskaya's artistic journey began with an expulsion – from the Soviet Artists' Union in 1979 for a portrait deemed "non-conformist," representing a false depiction of the Soviet man. This 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, showcases the results of a residency in the lagoon. Here, this asceticism culminates in a preference for fabric, which becomes her primary medium.

To truly understand Zatulovskaya's work, we must step back and abandon the concept of surface as a "screen." Instead, we should consider it a "body." Since the 1980s, the artist has eschewed canvas, perceiving it as an artificial whiteness, a support that is too "beautiful" and therefore morally inadequate to convey the roughness of reality. She has turned to 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 distinctly unique 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 become supports for a synthetic painting, almost childlike in its brutal precision. The humble material is no longer a limitation but an ethical condition. By embracing 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 time-worn matter.

Zatulovskaya's Sacred Spring, despite a title that evokes pagan rites and violent rebirths, is not celebratory. It is, rather, 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 a prisoner of its own image, Zatulovskaya's work operates through subtraction.

As Anna Sartor emphasizes: "By adopting the discarded, Zatulovskaya not only expresses the freedom to break away from forms that have already fulfilled their purpose (blank canvases), but simultaneously makes a moral choice: it is not so much the aesthetic element that is emphasized, but the ethical element from which the artist obliges us to observe reality through the prism of virtue and truth, without which beauty is not possible."