26th September – 26th October 2018
Press preview and opening: Tuesday 25th September 2018, 6.30 pm.
Officine Saffi, Via Aurelio Saffi 7, 20123, Milan.
From September 26th through October 26th Officine Saffi is pleased to present Irina Razumovskaya’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Irina Razumovskaya was born in Leningrad, in the USSR, in 1990. Although she is too young to belong to the Ostalgia generation, the twenty-seventh-year-old sculptor seems to be discretely fascinated by it. A fascination for uncommon beauty, and for the unexpected, leads her to describe in her works the essential profiles of household items, parts of machinery, or even details of buildings with all their possible nuances of gritti-ness. In her first solo exhibition in Milan, entitled Inner Geometry, Irina Razumovskaya presents a body of new ceramic works that enrich her reflection on the theme of matter deterioration, as she seeks to bring out the subtle emotional ties that pervade her deliberately anti-narrative artistic practice. “I have experimented a lot with surfaces - says Razumovskaya - in order to reproduce the ageing on the surfaces of architectural structures, evoking the feeling of layers of peeling paint or of the stone slowly crumbling”. Precisely to strengthen this conceptual link with architecture, she is experimenting with materials such as concrete. In the new Construct series, she combines sandblasted ceramic shapes with rough concrete surfaces creating a monochrome palette of grey tones. In this work, the intimate impression of an urban landscape is echoed, “which changes into a tangible experience through the layering of details and nuances”.

With Inner Geometry, Irina Razumovskaya collects imaginary finds from contemporary oneiric ruins, built on the vision of unconscious forms and symbols. She thus reiterates her firm conviction that lyricism consists more in concealing than in unveiling, and that art finds its maximum expression “between the lines” of a poem, between the cracks in ceramics, in the mystery, in its full etymological sense of what must not - or should not - be revealed.


**Exctract from the curatorial essay by Fabrizio Meris

Irina Razumovskaya was born in 1990 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Being entranced by art at the age of five, when she entered the Kustodiev Art School, her journey towards her art practice has not stopped ever since. In 2008, Irina entered the State Academy of Art and Design’s Fine Art and Ceramic and Glass Department, graduating magna cum laude both her BA and MFA degrees. Following this, in 2015, Irina was admitted to the prestigious Royal College of Art in London for her MA in Ceramics and Glass, she graduated in 2017 with overall Excellent grade. Her main form of artistic expression is ceramics and painting. Her art works have been a part of various international competitions, curated exhibitions, residencies and symposiums and have been exhibited across the world. Irina has held residencies in Germany, Spain, USA, Hungary, Taiwan, Switzerland, China etc., and her work is in collections of Chatsworth House, UK; The Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan; Icheon World Ceramic Center GICB in Korea; Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Arts in Kecskemet, Hungary; Yerevan Contemporary art museum, Armenia and private collections worldwide.