The Garden of Invisible Birds: Igor & Marina

Gallery Henoch is pleased to present The Garden of Invisible Birds, an exhibition of works by Igor and Marina. On view September 17 through October 10, 2026, the presentation features ten new paintings exploring the boundaries between the visible and the imagined. An opening reception will be held Thursday, September 17, 2026, from 6–8 PM. The event is free and open to the public.

Working together for more than two decades, husband-and-wife artists Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova have developed one of the most distinctive artistic partnerships in contemporary painting. Each of their paintings is jointly created from beginning to end, evolving through continuous dialogue and mutual refinement. As the artists write, "Most artistic collaborations divide the work. Ours attempts to dissolve authorship." The resulting paintings become something neither artist could have imagined individually, creating what they describe as "a third voice" that belongs to neither artist alone.

Drawing on the traditions of Renaissance painting, Russian iconography, Surrealism, and Abstraction, Igor & Marina create meticulous, classically inspired figures inhabiting dreamlike worlds. Their compositions combine luminous portraiture with bold passages of color, ornamental patterns, and symbolic imagery. Both backgrounds and attire reveal references to architecture, illuminated manuscripts, botanical forms, maps, and tapestries.

This interplay emerges throughout the new works, from the complex garments in Codex and Tricorn, which evoke both lace and cartography, to the pressed ferns and flattened geometric shapes in the backgrounds of Electric Herbarium and The Moment Before Certainty. Others of their paintings make direct reference to artists and artworks the two admire. These include the Unicorn Tapestries and Caravaggio’s still-life paintings in The Garden of Invisible Birds, Salvador Dalí’s surrealism in Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Turban, and Pinturicchio’s painting, The Boy in Red, in Avis Alba. The artists’ use of precious metals, including gold and palladium leaf, also connects the paintings to historical artistic traditions, particularly the use of gold in illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and Byzantine and Early Christian art.

The show’s title reflects a recurring theme: the presence of things that are sensed rather than fully seen. The paintings offer spaces where memory and imagination intersect, leaving meaning deliberately open to interpretation. Birds recur throughout the exhibition, appearing in works such as The Last Garden of the Moon, Avis Alba, and The Keeper of Two Horizons, where they function as symbols of guidance, mystery, and transformation. Figures move through these enigmatic spaces with a sense of calm enchantment, while fragments of floating architecture, fabrics woven with symbolic animals and intricate patterns, and passages of abstraction subtly interact with the subjects. The artists explain, "We are less interested in illustrating ideas than in creating paintings that unfold slowly, revealing new relationships over time."

Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova received their MFA degrees from the Mukhina Academy of Art and Design in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1985. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University, and is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States and abroad. They live and work in Chicago.