Irina Korina: I really do love artists, exhibits and museums

Russian Art Focus met with artist Irina Korina whose large-scale installations are exhibited in major museums in Moscow and around the world. In 2021 she was chosen as Artist of the Year at Russia’s main contemporary art fair, Cosmoscow.

Irina Korina (b.1977) graduated from the Faculty of Stage Design at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in 2000. She also studied at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As a stage designer, she has collaborated with numerous theatres in Russia, and from the beginning of the 2000’s she also started to create work for the cinema. In 2008 and 2015 Korina was a laureate of the Innovation State Prize, the Russian State competition for achievements in Contemporary Art, and was also awarded the Terna Award for Contemporary Art in 2012. In 2017 her artwork was presented within the main project at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Korina’s love of installation art, a preferred medium reveals something of her background in theatre stage design, and yet she also works on a more intimate scale in the more traditional fields of drawing and portraiture.

Her latest work for the Moscow Transport Museum and the Diversity United group exhibition in Berlin was produced remotely during the Covid-19 lockdown.