Irina Lotarevich

Silke Lindner is excited to present the first U.S. solo exhibition with American-Russian sculptor Irina Lotarevich. Her minimal, largely abstract metal sculptures emerge at the intersection of her individual experience within larger societal systems, and are shaped by the frameworks of her immediate environment. Referencing urban and industrial structures, architecture, labor and the body, her works navigate spaces between the personal and the collective.

Often using units like boxes, cells, and containers, Lotarevich creates modular systems that expand, contract, multiply, and subtract. Working with a varied palette of bought and scavenged metals, Lotarevich manipulates her raw materials through cutting, bending, welding, sanding, forging, and casting. Housing (Lottery), a square steel structure with a dense grid of 81 individually fabricated containers cut and folded out of sheet metal scrap from HVAC systems, recalls the repetitive facades of apartment buildings that reflect the systemic standardization of housing units. In Compressed Structure, a different set of brass boxes is condensed into a horizontally elongated sculpture, bearing fingerprints that subtly reveal human traces within industrial processes. Imitating a prong setting technique typically found in jewelry making to clasp the rectangular boxes, Lotarevich intertwines micro and macro scales on a formal level. Scaffolding, another work, exposes the hidden internal skeleton that holds the boxes of Compressed Structure, linking the sculptures to the scaffolding visible outside the gallery’s window and its surrounding locality.

Built from the inside out, other sculptures by Lotarevich incorporate organically shaped, heated, and bent steel loops within elongated trapezoidal containers. These forms, which evoke the human body and the labor involved in their creation, stand in opposition to the rigid, confining structures that contain them. Works like Contained Spine and Stuffed Cell emphasize the physical effort inherent in working with metal. While the sculptures appear minimal and sleek, faint traces of the artist’s labor and hand underscore the tension between mechanized, bureaucratic systems and the human body.

Irina Lotarevich (b. 1991, Rybinsk, Russia) immigrated to New York City as a child and currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She studied at Cornell University, Hunter College, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Solo and duo exhibitions Galvanic Couple, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Pensive State a two-person show with Anna Schachinger, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna (2019). Recently, her work has been included in group shows held at N/A, organised by Ginny on Frederick, Seoul; Scherben, hosted by Good Weather, Chicago (2024), Belvedere 21, Vienna; Silke Lindner, New York City; Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, Troyes (2023), Halle Für Kunst, Graz; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; Kunstverein Bielefeld, Bielefeld; MUMOK, Vienna (2022), Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2021), among others. Lotarevich’s work is in the permanent collections of mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig), Vienna, the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, and the Vienna Museum.