A solo exhibition by Irina Zatulovskaya has opened at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. It is an impressive survey of the artist’s unique creative method of diving into existential abysses by means of blending painting and found objects – raw and modest scraps of wood and metal.

Russian artist Irina Zatulovskaya (b. 1954) is showing her work for the first time in a vast retrospective set within the enfilades of an old mansion on Gogolevsky Boulevard in Moscow. Throughout numerous rooms, a scroll of her life unfolds – no less, no more. This scroll resonates with the Christian scrolls of Genesis as depicted in ancient frescoes, often held by angels.

Zatulovskaya is renowned for her practice of “handcrafted vision,” inherited from the theory of circular perception of the world and the ability to see with your eyes as well as with your hands, as taught by Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934), a theorist of art synthesis from the avant-garde era. Any experience of painting on worn, threadbare surfaces is transformed by Zatulovskaya into an act of synthesis between painting and handmade object. The craftwork reveals the fullest qualities of the painted picture, while the painting becomes a three-dimensional form. These qualities of "object painting" are richly displayed at the MMOMA exhibition, titled ‘Life’, divided into many sections. Biographical parts alternate with symbolic ones (about the map of time, the pantheon of great people of the past, and others).

Illustrated books by the artist are exhibited separately on a stepped pyramid; among them are editions of Russian literary classics by writers like Anton Chekhov, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Leskov, Leo Tolstoy, and Andrei Platonov. By Zatulovskaya’s design, the books themselves also become autonomous art objects.

The 19th century Romantics bequeathed to art the idea that genius is not the ambition of a demiurge but focused attention. Sensitivity and humility define the meaning of the art of Alexander Ivanov (1806–1858). Ivanov included his self-portrait in his opus magnum, the painting ‘The Appearance of Christ to the People’ (1837–1857). In the foreground, titanic heroes shape humanity’s fate, while the artist himself in a light, wide-brimmed hat stands barely visible in the shadows at the back, leaning on a staff. Painted in the manner of Giotto (1266/67–1337) he is the shepherd from the latter’s ‘Nativity’ fresco. Ivanov’s gift is to observe, to be a transparent vessel through which life energy flows. This energy cannot be diminished or scattered by restless, selfish motions. Instead of the active pose of the romantic demiurge, Ivanov chose the figure of an observer in the shadow. To see how Time flows, merging with Space – that is the mission of the humble contemplator.

In my view, Irina Zatulovskaya is an heir to the great romantic idea of humble contemplation of the mystery of the interpenetration of spirit and matter, Time and Space. The ‘Life’ exhibition at MMOMA shows, on every level – from the explicitly biographical to the symbolic biblical – that even the most banal rag, the most insignificant painful detail of the universe, can testify to cosmic harmony and light. And Giotto, so beloved by Ivanov, proves to be a living interlocutor for many of Zatulovskaya’s works.

Zatulovskaya’s biography closely mirrors the life path of the Moscow conceptualists. She studied at the Polytechnic Institute, specializing in book illustration, and in her youth worked in a softer variant of the ‘austere style.’ At the same time, she developed her own navigation in the art world, helped by unique teachers. For example, her grandfather, the artist Sergey Mikhailov (1893–1952), was one of the first teachers at the Moscow Secondary Artistic School, mentor to Erik Bulatov (b. 1933), Ilya Kabakov (1933-2023), and Gely Korzhev (1925–2012). To this day, Zatulovskaya teaches art according to the system of the Russian avant-garde guru Mikhail Matyushin.

Matyushin developed the idea of extended seeing, inspired by the fourth-dimension theory of philosopher and theosophist Pyotr Ouspensky (1878-1947). Matyushin wished to overcome the restrictive three-dimensional sliding of the eye along surfaces and introduce a fourth dimension. He dreamed of an organic connection with the spiritual, beyond everyday contact: “One must learn to encompass the visible with the eyes as with the hands, to run the eyes beyond volume. Only then will awareness of volume and its boundaries, rather than lines and contours, appear.”

Zatulovskaya’s exhibition unfolds in deep corridors, framed by thin, transparent screens, and in the hall dedicated to rural life, by a low garden hedge, as per the design of exhibition architects Kirill Asse and Nadia Korbut. This subtle experience of light spatial relations corresponds best with the artist’s delicate gift of “running the eyes beyond volume.” Her ability to extract the essence and fullness of an image from the poorest, most humble materials of everyday life and existence is remarkable.

As the curators note, “For a long time the artist has avoided canvases, preferring found scraps of plywood or bits of metal, as in works such as ‘Worldly Fried Egg’ (1999) or ‘Noah’s Ark’ (2023).” A few precise brushstrokes, a contour, a blot, a flash of light – and inside a corrugated metal washboard swim little fish; in a found crab shell a miracle of Botticelli’s (1445-1510) Venus’s birth unfolds; and in the diamond shape of an old door panel time slices through space as a wedge. Probably no one today better embodies the cherished romantic themes of universal divine presence and the spirit animating matter in the smallest and plainest cells of cosmic substance.

In old pieces of roofing iron, wooden boards, and fabric scraps, Zatulovskaya creates a mystery of life. As critic Anna Tolstova aptly observed, “The artist, like a midwife, only helps the truth of the image to be born, and the viewer takes an active part in the delivery – no wonder that seeing her works makes you want to pick up the brushes yourself.”

Zatulovskaya’s art is about vision, about divination as insight into the hidden harmony and unity of the world. A tiny shard holds the memory of the whole; it only needs to be made to speak. This theme is close to the Romantics, 20th-century metaphysical artists, and the poetry of Joseph Brodsky. In several rooms, on door panels, frames, and metal pediments, glows a gallery of cherished interlocutors of world culture dear to Zatulovskaya. Masters of the early 20th-century Paris squat ‘The Hive’ stand alongside the romantic singer of the material world of Pushkin’s era, Pavel Fedotov (1815–1852). Mikhail Matyushin looks towards Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966). The gurus of the first avant-garde, neo-primitivists Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) and Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), greet Timur Novikov (1958–2002), the guru of Leningrad neoacademism, on a stroll. All portraits are rendered in a naïve style – simple, sincere, and vulnerable, like children’s drawings. This innocence and sincerity, this trusting sweetness, recall the heroes of Yuri Norstein’s (b. 1941) animated cartoons, who is also included in Zatulovskaya’s gallery.

Thanks to these portraits, another thread of meaning emerges: Irina Zatulovskaya helps trace an important direction in Russian art from the 1970s to the contemporary period. This trajectory does not coincide with either abstract conceptualism or the ‘Russian povera’ version of neobrutalism. Rather, it represents a new neo-avant-garde trajectory that maintains roots in the great experiments of the 1910s and 1920s. In the field of contemporary art, neo-avant-garde blends with metaphysical ideas, existential experience of the present day, as well as with minimalism aesthetics and the reduction of verbosity in favour of honest presentation of “thingness.” It is fitting that one of the heroes of Zatulovskaya’s portrait series is Mikhail Roginsky (1931–2004), an observer of hidden life in the mundane order of things.