Texts / Press
Artist Statement
Iryna Merkulova’s practice examines how urban environments, consumer architectures, and everyday visual systems shape social behavior, memory, and belonging. Working primarily in painting and drawing, she treats the city as a layered psychological and political space – one that mediates identity through surfaces such as glass, signage, reflections, and domestic thresholds.
Rooted in her experience of migration, Merkulova approaches the built environment as something both intimate and estranging. Architectural fragments, interior scenes, and commonplace objects appear familiar yet unstable, functioning as sites where personal memory intersects with collective systems of consumption, regulation, and visibility. Rather than documenting specific locations, her work reconstructs how space is perceived, misread, and internalized.
Her paintings often operate through visual ambiguity – overlapping reflections, obstructed views, and compressed spatial planes – inviting viewers to question how meaning is produced through looking. These compositional strategies reflect an interest in how contemporary subjects navigate cities shaped by economic pressure, cultural displacement, and mediated experience.
Through a sustained engagement with urban perception, Merkulova’s work asks how social structures become embedded in visual form, and how painting can serve as a critical tool for examining the subtle ways environments influence identity, agency, and social relations.
Blind Contour
Blind Contour explores the fleeting, often unnoticed moments of urban transit. Drawing from daily commutes, Merkulova captures the choreography of bodies moving through shared spaces where anonymity and intimacy coexist. Reflections, windows, and architectural structures create shifting boundaries that both connect and separate individuals.
The works in this series emphasize perception as an unstable, layered experience. Figures appear doubled, blurred, or partially concealed, echoing the fragmented attention of contemporary life. The compositions evoke the sensation of looking while in motion: glimpses, distortions, and the quiet emotional undercurrents of public space.
By focusing on these transient encounters, Merkulova reveals the subtle social dynamics of urban life that includes moments of solitude, tension, and quiet connection that unfold within the collective rhythm of the city.
Parallel Surfaces
Parallel Surfaces investigates the reflective architectures of the contemporary city through a series of coloured pencil drawings focused on commercial vitrines and their layered visual fields. These surfaces operate as parallel planes where urban fragments, objects, and incidental details converge, activating associative memories tied to a life shaped by displacement.
The project positions drawing as a method of sustained, proximate observation—one that foregrounds the perceptual instability produced by an uprooted gaze. Rather than functioning as urban documentation, the works interrogate how reflection, memory, and spatial dislocation co‑construct the act of looking. In doing so, Parallel Surfaces examines the shifting thresholds between perception and belonging embedded within everyday urban encounters.
Glass & Plastic
Glass & Plastic examines the visual and psychological impact of commercial imagery on the urban landscape. In this series, reflective surfaces – windows, bus shelters, storefronts – become sites where advertising, architecture, and human presence collide. Figures appear partially obscured or fragmented, caught between the physical world and the seductive illusions projected onto it.
Merkulova uses these layered visual fields to question how public space is shaped by commercial narratives. The paintings reveal a city where bodies are constantly mediated by images, where the boundary between lived experience and constructed desire becomes increasingly porous. Through subtle distortions and overlapping planes, the works expose the tension between visibility and erasure, agency and influence, selfhood and spectacle.
This series positions the viewer within the visual noise of contemporary life, inviting reflection on how we navigate environments saturated with persuasion.