Some artists arrive at painting by vocation. Others return to it out of necessity. Irina Kurganskaya belongs to the second group, and that, more than her technical virtuosity, is what makes her work so compelling.
A return, not a beginning
Born Iryna Pidlisna in Kharkiv in 1980, Irina has drawn since childhood and graduated from the I. Repin Art School in her home city. As a teenager she studied watercolour with the American artist Carrie Stuart Parks, a leading name in portrait drawing and forensic art, and later refined her technique under Natalia Nesterova and Shelley Prior.
Then life took her elsewhere. She graduated from the National Law Academy of Ukraine and practised law for more than twenty years, including diplomatic postings abroad. Painting never disappeared. It simply waited.
The return came in 2022, when she moved to Portugal. She describes it plainly: the beautiful nature of this country inspired her to pick up her brushes again. An artist from Kharkiv starting over in Portugal in 2022 is not simply changing address. She is rebuilding a relationship with memory, with place and with time. It is no coincidence that her 2023 exhibition in Starnberg, Germany, was titled "Reborn".
The discipline of looking
Anyone who follows Irina's path notices one thing: her legal and diplomatic training is not a footnote in her biography. It lives in the paintings. There is rigour, patience, method. She builds each work in layers, gradually, until realism stops being an end in itself and becomes a way of telling stories.
She says she paints "as a way to slow time down". To me, that is the key to her entire practice. In a world of images that flash past on a screen in half a second, Irina asks the opposite of us: to stop, to look closely, to notice what has become so familiar that we no longer see it.
She works mainly in watercolour, drawn to its fluidity and luminosity, and in acrylic when she wants more depth and texture. The two are almost opposite languages: watercolour forgives nothing, acrylic lets you build and correct. Mastering both with this degree of confidence is rare.
Portugal seen from outside, and therefore seen better
Those who choose to live in Portugal often see what locals have stopped noticing. Her series "Portuguese Harvest on Azulejo Time" proves the point. Olives and a small bowl of olive oil, oranges and grapefruit, apples: still lifes set against azulejo patterns, painted in watercolour with a restrained palette and very fine layering.
At Stronddo we hold three works from this series. In "Olives and Olive Oil", the blue and white of the tiles gives the green of the olives an almost ceremonial quality. It is a painting about heritage, without folklore or postcard clichés. The azulejo stops being decoration and becomes ground, context, accumulated time.
The same attention runs through her "Floral Heritage" series, represented here by "Yellow Chrysanthemum", and botanical pieces such as "Bright Red Poppy Flower" and "Orchid Serenity". They are excellent entry points for new collectors.
Roads of memory
For me, though, the heart of Irina's work lies elsewhere: in the "Roads of Memory" series.
"Turquoise Memories" is the largest piece of hers in our collection, an acrylic on canvas measuring 100 × 70 cm. A turquoise classic car against a backdrop of amber leaves and fading light. The car is rendered with meticulous realism; the background dissolves in an almost impressionistic way. It is a dialogue between motion and stillness, between what we remember sharply and what is already slipping away.
"Through the Steams of Memories" goes further, and is perhaps the most personal work to have passed through the gallery. A steam locomotive emerges from the past, painted in acrylic on a canvas onto which Irina has collaged an authentic vintage USSR road map. The map is territory and journey, but also a country that no longer exists and a geography the artist left behind.
In another work from the series, "Grey Legend", she paints a Volga 21, the first car she ever rode in and the companion of countless family journeys across the former Soviet Union. This is not naive nostalgia. It is memory without melodrama.
What her Instagram reveals
Irina's Instagram, @13kis, shows an artist in constant, highly organised production. Her highlights are arranged by series: "Roads of Memory", "Floral Heritage", "Woodland Story", "Bark Society", "Headlines", "Whispers". In her bio she presents herself as an acrylic and watercolour artist, a textile artist and a designer.
She is currently publishing "Chromatic Wonders": triptychs devoted to a single colour, explored through fruit. After green (apples, pears, gooseberries) and blue (blueberries, grapes, plums), she has moved on to purple, with figs, artichokes and blackberries. The captions always return to the same idea: what we discover when we look more closely. "One colour. Three wonders. Endless little details," she writes.
I see a rare coherence in this. Whether in a Soviet locomotive or a blackberry, Irina's gesture is always the same: giving weight and presence to what we usually overlook.
Why we chose her
Irina's works now sit in private collections from the United States to Asia, but that is not why she is part of Stronddo.
We chose her because her work brings together two things that rarely meet: impeccable technique and a biography you can feel in every canvas without it ever being spelled out. Irina paints Portugal with the gratitude of someone who found a new beginning here, and paints the past with the serenity of someone who has made peace with it.
In her own words, art should make people think, but it should also be a pleasure to look at. I have rarely seen that idea so fully realised.
Irina Kurganskaya's works are available in her collection at Stronddo.
Clara Almeida Reis is the curator at Stronddo, where she writes about the artists in the gallery.
Works by Irina Kurganskaya at Stronddo
A selection of works currently available. Scroll sideways to see more, or visit the collection.
