Inara Bagirova, Ukrainian painter in residence at the Cité internationale des arts

Inara Bagirova is a Ukrainian visual artist who developed her painting skills with Larissa Rosova and Alexey Kolesnikov, and is a winner of the Institut français' residency programme at the Cité internationale des arts. 

Inara Bagirova has taken part in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad, including at the Spiritual Treasures of Ukraine museum, the Re Space gallery in Berlin, the Vanda Gallery in Tbilisi, the Art Vilnius contemporary art fair in Lithuania and Backslash Paris. 

Inara Bagirova's photo-realistic painting captures contemporary solitude in its social, psychological and existential dimensions. 

In her Perception skills series, she explores the conflict between the visible and the hidden, through hyper-realistic and empathetic work featuring strange characters. 

The Cardboard project series is the result of research into the particular situation that confronted Ukrainian artists on the morning of 24 February 2022. What position should we adopt in the creative process to express this terrifying reality? 

The images of paper bags and cardboard boxes, of hastily-packed packages, symbols of flight, left their mark on the artist's imagination during the first moments of the war. 

During the creation of these works, Inara Bagirova stumbled across the Masquerade series (1962), a unique collaboration between comic artist Saul Steinberg and photographer Inge Morath, depicting wealthy Americans wearing paper masks in their posh Upper East Side homes. 

Although the community painted by Bagirova and the one photographed by Morath are very different, these images were taken in New York during the Cuban missile crisis. For the first time, the world was on the brink of self-destruction, and the anxiety on their faces was concealed beneath the same masks later depicted by the Ukrainian artist. 

Bagirova arrived in France in 2022, where she was awarded a residency by the Fiminco Foundation. In 2023, she will continue her work at the Cité internationale des arts.