Irini Bachlitzanaki

Irini Bachlitzanaki was born in Athens, Greece in 1984. She studied History of Art at UCL and Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts and the Royal Academy Schools in London from where she graduated in 2021. As an extension of her artistic practice she has curated a number of exhibitions and is interested in occasionally pursuing curatorial work in line with her artistic research.

She lives and works in Athens and London.

“Inspired by material culture and the biographies of objects I build upon a world that is known and familiar to examine our relationship to the objects we share our lives with and the spaces they inhabit, and to explore things as a means of knowing—and ever discovering—the world around us.

Within a practice that is primarily sculptural, I combine processes like casting with ceramics, embroidery, printmaking and photography to interrogate not only the relationship of sculpture to other forms of representation but also the relationship of making works of art to other forms of production, artefacts and commodities. Employing materials and techniques often referencing design or drawn from craft and artisanal traditions contributes to the creation of hybrid objects that aim to shift the established, commonplace relationship between form and function as hierarchies between different disciplines become ambiguous.

In my recent works three dimensional objects are flattened and recede into the wall, while conversely, images give the impression they are about to break free of their two-dimensional constraints. Blurring the boundaries between two and three-dimensional space these works play with the idea of recognisability and draw on a range of different associations. I think of them as fluctuating between matter-of-fact objects and prototypes in a constant state of becoming; or as theatrical props that exist in an indetermined state between fact and fiction, simultaneously artificial and real. Drawing on the idea of illusion at play and pondering on the artifice of representation, they oscillate between stillness and movement, presence and absence and make use of foreshortening, visual trickery and the interplay between image and object to explore different ways of looking.

Through interlocking vocabularies that draw from a seemingly disparate array of sources, from the legacies of modernism and languages of production to the allure of the domestic and the handmade, the works explore the relationship of the work of art to other goods and commodities in the marketplace. Bringing together issues of authenticity, reproducibility and the copy, they raise questions about the role of skill in art and the contemporary place of craft in relation to material culture and the social life of things.”