Ragged and chaotic graphics, machine-made sculptures and a high production value video — why have these works, all so different from one another, been brought together within an intimate gallery space? Why do they even constitute the practice of a single artist?

Production Failure is a personal exhibition of new works by Irina Petrakova in which the human and the animal, the man-made and the natural, the deliberate and the accidental collide and make contact with each other.

In the storm of oil paint in Petrakova’s graphic works, parts of human bodies, animal claws or fishtails rush by. This whirlwind of recognisable objects, abstract bodily masses and purposefully careless strokes reveals a transitional state between figurativeness and abstraction in which neither representation nor interpretation plays a decisive role. In the works on canvas and on small graphic sheets, a unique moment in the breakdown of the visual image is captured. This fault in production has been allowed intentionally by the artist: both as a way of bringing to life a different reality and documenting a new stage in the development of the physical.

In two new sculptures from the Broiler-pass series — realised in a 3D printing technique not usually employed the artist — the investigation of the liminal continues with human and animal images converging again. However, unlike graphics, this contradictory union is not achieved through a hurricane, and the meeting point of the human, animal and mechanical is easy to determine. But even with all of their apparent precision and calculation, we find it hard to choose the side of figurativeness or abstraction — it is equally impossible to accept and reject the reality of the forms created by Petrakova. As if generated by a printer software glitch, the sculptures are the creations of another world, indistinguishable from ours in the recent past.

The liminal space returns in the video that concludes the exhibition, where it becomes dynamic: in observing the oscillation between the images of the man and the beast. Over time, the heroine with increasing intensity discovers her animal nature — the “production failure” makes itself felt again, this time in a specific living organism.

The graphics, sculptures and video on view at the Iragui gallery — with all their contrasts and similarities — reveal to us not only the essence of the practice but also the character of the artist Irina Petrakova. A stormcloud of ideas, brushstrokes, connections and inconsistencies, images that come to life and are immediately crossed out. Only for a fraction of a second does a glitch occur and the moment is recorded, but the storm itself never ends.

Nikolay Alutin,
curator