Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova

Igor Kozlovsky /b. 1956, Slobodskoi, Kirov Region, Russia.

Marina Sharapova /b. 1960, Leningrad, Sankt-Petersburg, Russia.

Igor and Marina are husband and wife artistic team, working together on the same canvas. Artists, designers, interior architects.

Working as a husband-and-wife team, the Russian-born duo Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova collaborate on each painting.

Igor and Marina were rigorously taught the skills of the Old Renaissance Masters within their academic training at Mukhina Academy of Art and Design in St. Petersburg, Russia and learned to combine ancient and modern techniques with fluidity.

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.

Marina possesses an excellent subtle touch for realistic drawing and is capable of creating new images on the basis of the works of older artists, particularly those of the Italian and Dutch renaissance.

Igor’s specialty is a subtle sense for color, a wonderful appreciation for the tactile nature of paint, canvas, and wood, and an intuitive feel for how to play with abstract images.

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.

The figures in the artists’ paintings look at once contemporary and historical-they might be modern people garbed in costumes of the past; they might be past people plunged into the present.

With their finely tuned sense of all that is enigmatic, seductive, and dreamlike in life, Igor and Marina wholeheartedly embrace their surreal perspective by forcing us to enter their invented new world.