Irina Nakhova

Biography

In 1974 Nakhova’s name appeared on the list of participants in the “Bulldozer Exhibition”, the open-air show of unofficial artists in Moscow that the authorities broke up, but because of threats from the authorities she never took part. She was about nineteen.

She was born in 1955 in Moscow. Her father, Isai Mikhailovich Nakhov (1920–2006), was a philologist and a professor at Moscow State University; her mother worked at the publishing house Detgiz and knew many artists. Through her mother Nakhova, still a teenager, found her way into the studio of Viktor Pivovarov, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism: her mother had come to look at his work, and the daughter saw how unofficial art lived. Soon she knew Ilya Kabakov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Eduard Steinberg and Eduard Gorokhovsky. According to some accounts, Pivovarov later became her mentor, but this is hard to confirm, and I leave it as a cautious supposition. From 1972 to 1978 she studied in the correspondence department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. Her first independent experiments in painting, mostly easel painting, date from the mid-1970s. At various times she studied with Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Jan Raukhvarger, Sofia Gannushkina and Yuri Burdzhelyan. From 1983 she took part in actions by the group Collective Actions. In 1986 she joined the book-illustration section of the Moscow Union of Artists and illustrated more than fifty books; her membership in the Union of Artists, according to some accounts, lasted until 1989.

Her main work of these years was done at home. In her two-room apartment she gave one room over to experiments: she could, for example, paint it entirely grey, furniture and objects included. The series “Rooms” (1983–1987) is considered the first “total installation” in Russian art; one of its parts is known as “Room No. 2”. Here the space itself becomes the work, and the viewer finds himself inside it. The art historian Ekaterina Degot wrote that in Nakhova’s installations painting is present as a gesture: she paints the canvas of camp beds (“Camping”, 1990) or the cloth of coats (“Friends and Neighbors”, 1994). To my mind this is an accurate observation, and it also explains her later inflatable sculptures such as “Big Red” (1999).

On 7 July 1988 Sotheby’s held its first international auction in Moscow, and Nakhova’s work was included, one of the youngest participants. Invitations to exhibitions abroad followed. The first was the Berlin show “Iskunstvo” (1988), organized by Lisa Schmitz; that same year came Bern and Turku. In 1989 her solo exhibition “Partial Triumph I” opened in London, and the American gallerist Phyllis Kind gave her several solo shows in New York, her first in the United States (“Momentum Mortis”, 1990; “Recent Works”, 1992).

In 1991 Nakhova received a green card and moved to the United States. In 1994–1997 she taught painting at Wayne State University in Detroit, and later taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton and the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995 she organized a collaborative installation, “Cathedral of Time”, at the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit. She now lives and works in New Jersey and Moscow.

In 2011 the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, on Gogolevsky Boulevard, showed her large retrospective “Rooms”, and “Room No. 2” was recreated. In 2013 her project “Without a Title” won the Kandinsky Prize in the category Project of the Year. The artist herself described it as a reckoning with history understood through the history of her family: among her close relatives was a grandfather who was shot. In the same year “Paradise”, a continuation of “Rooms”, was shown at Vinzavod, a contemporary art centre in Moscow.

In 2015 Nakhova represented Russia at the 56th Venice Biennale: her “Green Pavilion” occupied the building designed by Aleksei Shchusev in 1914. The commissioner was Stella Kesaeva, the curator Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna. The building was painted green on the outside, an opening was cut between the floors, and inside there were four rooms with sculpture, video and painting. In 2018–2019 “Room No. 2” was recreated for Tate Modern, and in 2019 the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University held her first museum retrospective in the United States, “Museum on the Edge”.