Irina Ibragimova

My paintings are about nature as memory — fragments of light, movement and color that stay with you after the moment itself is gone. I work primarily in oil, building up texture in layers until a landscape feels less like a view and more like a feeling: the heat before a Mediterranean storm, the last color of a vineyard before harvest, the strange stillness of a myth half-remembered.

I came to painting late, and by a long road. For fifteen years I worked as a pediatrician in Kazakhstan — work that asks everything of you and gives back both joy and loss in equal measure. When my second son was born, I was thirty-seven, and something in me finally had room to open. I picked up a brush and never really put it down.

Moving to Spain changed my palette before it changed anything else. The paintings that once stayed muted and heavy became brighter, saturated, more alive — the sea does that, I think. Most of my early work stayed behind in Kazakhstan; what I paint now is, in a way, starting over with everything I've learned.

I'm self-taught — my education came from masterclasses, from standing in front of paintings in museums across the world for far longer than was polite, and from an analyst's habit of taking a piece apart before I eve...

Self-taught. Formed through years of studying technique and color theory in museums across Europe and beyond, and through ongoing online masterclasses. I approach each new work analytically before it becomes intuitive.

ARTBOX. PROJECT BASEL 2.0, Euroairport Basel, Switzerland From 15th-18th June 2023