Working together for more than two decades, husband-and-wife artists Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova have developed one of the most distinctive artistic partnerships in contemporary painting. Each of their paintings is jointly created from beginning to end, evolving through continuous dialogue and mutual refinement. As the artists write, "Most artistic collaborations divide the work. Ours attempts to dissolve authorship." The resulting paintings become something neither artist could have imagined individually, creating what they describe as "a third voice" that belongs to neither artist alone.
Drawing on the traditions of Renaissance painting, Russian iconography, Surrealism, and Abstraction, Igor & Marina cr ate meticulous, classically inspired figures inhabiting dreamlike worlds. Their compositions combine luminous portraiture with bold passages of color, ornamental patterns, and symbolic imagery. Both backgrounds and attire reveal references to architecture, illuminated manuscripts, botanical forms, maps, and tapestries.
This interplay emerges throughout the new works, from the complex garments in Codex and Tricorn, which evoke both lace and cartography, to the pressed ferns and flattened geometric shapes in the backgrounds of Electric Herbarium and The Moment Before Certainty. Others of their paintings make direct reference to artists and artworks the two admire. These include the Unicorn Tapestries and Caravaggio’s still-life paintings in The Garden of Invisible Birds, Salvador Dalí’s surrealism in Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Turban, and Pinturicchio’s painting, The Boy in Red, in Avis Alba. The artists’ use of precious metals, including gold and palladium leaf, also connects the paintings to historical artistic traditions, particularly the use of gold in illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and Byzantine and Early Christian art.
