LONDON.- GRAD is collaborating with Irina Korina to present her first solo exhibition in London Destined to be Happy. The Moscow-based artist will be taking over the gallery and will transform the space into an immersive environment by creating a site-specific audio-visual installation.

Building on her training as a set-designer and exploring multiple social discrepancies between intrinsic and extrinsic well-being, Korina has created six sculptural characters ranging from Love to Rainbow that are placed in the unconventional, even hostile, habitat. The audience will experience the macabre reality of Korina’s greyscale domain, punctuated with characters whose emotional relatability is laid bare for scrutiny. What were once symbols of comfort have been stripped of their warmth, forcing the participants to confront their own socio-political complacency.

Juxtaposing concepts of global and local, epic and colloquial, physical and virtual, Korina continues her anthropological research into the paradoxes of human behavior. Through her pseudo-monumental and deceitfully joyous installations Korina addresses urgent issues such as collective memory, cultural and social history and challenges our traditional perceptions of everyday routine.

The title of the exhibition Destined to be Happy refers to the British documentary directed by Sergey Miroshnichenko. Following in the tradition of the original UK Up Series, this documentary, initiated in 1987, revisits a group from the now former Soviet Union and tracks their development against a backdrop of social and political change every seven years.

Born in 1977 in Moscow to the family of a nuclear physicist and a chemist, Irina Korina is the great-granddaughter of the prominent Socialist realist painter Pavel Korin as well as a descendant of renowned generations of artists who specialized in icon painting at the Palekh region of Russia for several centuries. Graduating as a set designer from the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS) Korina continuously worked in theater and film while at the same time presenting her works independently, creating overwhelming environments and spaces. Her trademark large-scale sculptures incorporate a variety of materials from textiles to plastic and plasticine, and provide a strong social commentary on the everyday Russian reality.

A recent publication by renowned Moscow-based art-critic and theorist Irina Kulik positions Irina Korina’s works in the context of installations by Louise Bourgeois, environments by Yayoi Kusama and rooms by Irina Nakhova thus underlying her strong connection with the leading feminist artists of the XX century.

Irina Korina’s work has been widely recognized in Russia as well as internationally. In 2009 she was among a group of artists who represented Russia at the Venice Biennale. Her recent exhibitions have included solo shows at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia and Stella Art Foundation, Russia, as well as recent group shows at Mukha, Antwerpen, Saatchi Gallery, London and Kielhaus, Berlin.