Irina Ojovan (*1988, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova) is a Düsseldorf based artist. She studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Turin, Rome and Munich, graduating in 2018 as a master student of Gregor Hildebrandt. She has completed residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), CCA Andratx, Mallorca (2022), and a Griffelkunst printmaking scholarship in Hamburg (2023). In 2020, she received the Bavarian Art Prize for Visual Arts and exhibited at the Galerie der Künstler in Munich in early 2021. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Museum of Art of Romania, Skulpturenmuseum Marl, Brücke Museum Berlin, Stadtgalerie Kiel, NRW-Forum/Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Villa Schöningen, PIN. Auktion at Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Sotheby’s Munich, The Hole New York, LOOCK Berlin, Cosar Düsseldorf, 10 A.M.ART Milan and is part of the collection of Mgk Otterndorf.

In her painting and sculpture, Ojovan moves in the interplay of materiality, external formality and its inherent meaning. The title Inherited Profiles refers to tools for stucco elements that her father designed in his work as an architect. Appropriated by Ojovan, these profiles, as part of her personal history, become the building blocks of a new visual world and, in a sense, form the synthesis of her cross-temporal worlds of memory. On a formal level, the profile functions as an outline of a form or figure and is at the same time a metaphor for a biography, including her experiences and emotional feelings. Ojovan translates this tension into abstract forms and pictorial compositions reduced to a few geometric surfaces, which open up their own emotional and associative spaces through color and surface texture. Through their reference to architecture, Ojovan’s paintings and sculptures interact with the exhibition space and thus deal with the representation of information versus non-information, emptiness and the limits of the visible.