September 19 – November 9, 2024
Opening: Thursday September 19, from 6 p.m.
Iryna Maksymova – Landscape’s Body
curated by Ivan Quaroni
In his gallery in Milan, Antonio Colombo hosts the first exhibition in Italy by the young Ukrainian artist Iryna Maksymova, who through her paintings and tapestries woven by hand explores the themes of feminism and national identity, often overlapping these concepts in an aesthetic dimension that draws on outsider art.
Born in Kolomyia, a town in the province of Prykarpattia marked by the presence of a strong tradition of folk painting and crafts, the artist has translated her interest in Ukrainian folklore and naïve art into a figurative lexicon capable of combining impressions of the past and the urgent issues of the present.
The title of the exhibition, Landscape’s Body, refers to reflections on the wounds and alterations inflicted on the Ukrainian territory because of the war with Russia. The recent production of Iryna Maksymova, in fact, focuses on the symbolic representation of her country. The artist takes her cue from the feminine phonetics of words like “country” (країна) and “Ukraine” (Україна), and from the personification – again feminine – of the “mother country,” as it is represented in the gigantic de-Sovietized monument that looks towards the east from the hills above the right bank of the River Dnepr, the location of historic Kyiv, to narrate through women the energy and vital force of a nation.
Iryna Maksymova uses a simple and immediate language with a neo-primitivist matrix, blending expressionist influences and folk impressions that remind us of the works of self-taught artists like the Ukrainian painter Maria Prymachenko. Her large paintings and tapestries produced by hand, recovering remnants of fabric in a virtuous ecological practice of upcycling, explore the landscape not only through imagery of the female (and male) nude, but also through a bestiary composed of domestic and wild animals, often represented as sentient creatures or protective spirits.
“With my works of figurative and naïve art,” the artist says, “I address the problems of the world that have a personal impact on me, and I try to encourage equality and interconnection, at the same time developing the traditional motifs of Ukrainian folklore in new visual forms.”
Iryna Maksymova was born and raised in a small town in the western part of Ukraine, known as Kolomyia. In 2013 she took a degree at the department of Graphic Design of the Lviv Polytechnic National University. She began her career as an artist in 2020 with her first solo exhibition in Lviv. Since then, Maksymova has taken part in various group shows in Ukraine and elsewhere, including New York (2022), London (2022), Madrid (2022), Beijing (2022), Los Angeles (2021), Berlin (2021).
