Irinka Talakhadze paints stoic women, solid women, each with what seems like a similar square haircut, each wrapped in colorful but plain and massive uniforms, holding a cigarette or a small briefcase. Are they part of some dystopian bureaucracy, maybe a Beckett play?

From Georgia, Talakhadze embraces the Soviet aesthetic to portray a colorful disenchantment.

Her work explores the relationship between a thing and its essence, between what we see and what an image implies.

This precarious equilibrium reveals just how sadly dystopian an image can be, even if, at first glance, the representation might be veiled with a utopian varnish. It thus reveals how utopia and dystopia can coexist within the same image.

Irinka Talakhadze ventures into the territory of phenomenology and revisits matters related to perception that have fascinated philosophers and art historians and have equally captured the attention of artists.

What interests her is the correlation between appearance and that which appears, and the way in which this correlation allows us to understand the relationship between the self and the world. Her landscapes annul the concept of a border through which one defines one's belonging to a place; they end up representing a world-nation in which different identities annul one another by overlapping.

Born in 2000 in Georgia, Tbilisi, Irinka now lives and works there.