Irina Lotarevich

Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Artist statement

I am a sculptor working with metal and using metalwork as both a technical method and conceptual framework. I hand-fabricate the majority of my work and was trained as a fabricator alongside my art practice. My process involves cutting, welding, bending sheet metal, sanding, forging, casting, and patination. I work with steel, stainless steel, brass, bronze, and aluminum. The final forms of my sculptures are directly shaped by the constraints, logic, and traditions of metalworking. The byproducts or offcuts of the metalworking process often recirculate into my work and function as a material. My work is driven by an obsessive and laborious repetition, which produces forms that feel compressed, tense, and tightly contained. This repetition mirrors systems of control, accumulation, and pressure found in physical structures and abstract systems. I have drawn inspiration from shipping containers, compartments, housing structures, jewellery settings, and, most recently, stock market movements and financial heat maps, where financial uncertainty and possible outcomes are translated into rigid, rectilinear visual order. Playful and nostalgic symbols, such as fortune tellers, appear in my works alongside references to labor, the body, and built structures, creating shifts between intimacy and architecture-scale monumentality. Scale is central to my practice. I often reference standardised measurements and model or architectural scales while also using my own body as a unit of...

Artwork