"Unity" Painting

Painter and visual artist. Forms in transformation. A Dutch artist working across painting and other visual media, Naraeva has been active since 2002 and has lived and worked in the Netherlands since 2022.
Painting is at the centre of her practice. Alongside it, she works with collage, assemblage, digital print and video. Her visual language moves between abstraction and figuration, using transformation of form, layering, fragmentation and deliberate distortion of reality to explore emotional and existential experience.
Transformation is a recurring principle throughout the work of Naraeva. She is interested in states of transition, the ways in which forms emerge, change, dissolve and reappear, and how one state can carry traces of another. Across painting and digital media, natural forms, human figures, cities and other familiar images are transformed through shifts in form, scale and perspective, becoming unstable and open to new interpretations.
Her ongoing Metamorphoses series explores one of the central expressions of this broader idea, the relationship between human beings and nature. Trees and natural forms acquire anthropomorphic qualities, evoking bodies and figures and becoming carriers of memory and witnesses of time. Boundaries between the human and the natural become porous and fluid, opening up themes of connection and separation, vulnerability and resilience, growth and decay.

Beyond Metamorphoses, the work of Naraeva moves between nature and the urban environment, the organic and the constructed, memory and imagination. Across different media, she returns to cycles of emergence, disappearance and renewal, as well as to the absurdity of time, the silence between moments, and the subtle intensity of human feeling.
Naraeva has participated in numerous exhibitions and international art projects, including special projects of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. She is a member of Haagse Kunstkring in The Hague and Kadmium in Delft. In 2025, Haagse Kunstkring presented her solo exhibition Metamorphoses. A second solo exhibition at Haagse Kunstkring is scheduled for 2027. Earlier works and exhibitions may also be found under the names Irina Naraeva and Irene Kovalevskaya.
Her works are held in private collections in Russia, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.