* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova are a husband/wife art duo based in Chicago, IL.
Working as an artistic team, the Russian-born duo collaborates on each canvas, Marina contributing her impressive skills as a figurative artist in the Old Master tradition, Igor lending his refined sense of color,shape, texture and affinity for abstract images. As a result, the paintings are influenced by, and recall, a diverse spectrum of artists and eras: famous avant-garde figures like Chagall, Malevich, and Kandinsky as well as fifteenth-century Russian religious painters. Partly, this array of forbearers reflects the artists’ educations: trained in rigorous Russian academies to appreciate both ancient and modern techniques, they learned to combine past and present with fluidity.
In each of their canvases we sense a narrative implied, but we always fall short of piecing it together – it’s like waking up from a dream. And just as dreams synthesize all manner of seemingly disparate material into cohesive experiences, so Igor and Marina blend the modern and traditional, the representational and the abstract – and indeed their own divergent personalities – into each finished painting.
