Valérie Dufour & Rachel Hardouin present the exhibition Irina Ionesco 1970-1980 simultaneously in two galleries.
The photographs and vintage prints selected by the photographer as part of her retrospective at the REFLEX gallery in Amsterdam in 2016 are presented simultaneously to the public in the two galleries located in the heart of Paris’s 10th arrondissement, starting Tuesday, March 25th.
This collection of original works has never before been presented to the public in France.
Irina Ionesco by Rachel Hardouin
To explore Irina Ionesco’s work from the 1970s to the 1980s is to step into a theatrical universe of great creativity and remarkable narrative richness. This collection, produced using an analog camera and black-and-white films, reveals and highlights several layers of the artist’s life and of her imagination, rooted in absolute femininity.
A feminine perspective on women, a dream life that seems constantly reinvented.
The work of Irina Ionesco that we have chosen to present is part of the pivotal period of the 1970s, when the world was shifting from a rejection of the imperialism of the American dream to a quest for freedom of thought and body. Artists were taking a stand against violence and wars, French women were speaking out, taking to the streets to defend their rights, and minorities were speaking out to gain visibility and share more civic rights. Another world was emerging, which one?
Irina’s world is located between 16, boulevard Soult (Paris 12th) where her grandmother lives, the Porte Dorée where her accomplice Corneille, a painter from the Cobra movement, had an artist’s studio of the city of Paris, and the Saint-Mandé cemetery where Irina liked to wander and glean materials for her future productions.
Irina’s world lies somewhere between the reality of a complex childhood and the mirror of a dream life. Irina was born in Paris in 1930. Her parents decided to entrust her to her grandmother in Romania at the age of four. To express herself, Irina became a dancer, more precisely a snake charmer, in a burlesque setting, traveling across Europe on the eve of and during the Second World War.
Irina’s worlds are situated in a boundless space of imagination. The series presented, all chosen by Irina Ionesco to compose the retrospective exhibition in 2016 at the Reflex Gallery in Amsterdam, and the sumptuous catalog offer this remarkable quality: authenticity!
Authenticity and great rarity of prints hand made in the laboratory, signed and countertyped with comments by the artist.
Practicing photography with the Nikon F given to her by Corneille opened her up to a world where dream and reality meet theatricality. Thus, in her small bedroom, she staged Fafa, Jacqueline, Isis, Natacha, Silvia,… muses from the limbo of Irina’s Slavic and Baroque world. Immortality, Japonism, Orientalism, fetishism, Eros and Thanatos, the world of childhood, doll games, Venetian masks, mirrors, hangings, disparate accessories such as the samovar, the menorah, a ceramic funeral flower, a plastic sunflower, Calais and Caudry lace, gilded drapes, psychedelic paper, a cinema poster form an eclectic decor. A breeding ground for life, witness of the miracle that Irina experiences when she became an art photographer.
Far, very far from the current trivialization of the sensual and the carnal, Irina casts a woman’s eye on women. A powerful and assertive femininity. A bare exposure.
Her feminist revolution by candlelight, from an open window onto Boulevard Soult, a revolution imbued with melancholy and freedom. Irina thus laid the foundations of the imaginary character of a powerful and free woman, outspoken or abandoned, sensual or frivolous, for the world’s great and mighty. Paloma Picasso, Chantal Thomass, Yves Saint Laurent… drew inspiration from these unforgettable photographs to build their image throughout the world. A visionary and singular female photographer. A free woman indeed.
Rachel Hardouin, January 2025.
Exhibition Irina Ionesco 1970-1980 from Tuesday, March 25th to Tuesday, May 6th, 2025 in two galleries simultaneously.
Galerie La Lison
5, rue Pierre Chausson
75010 Paris
+33 1 44 59 68 20
Thursday to Saturday from 10 AM to 7 PM
https://www.galerie-la-lison.com/
Galerie Rachel Hardouin
15, rue Martel
75010 Paris
Intercom “15martel” 4th floor on the left
https://15martel.com/
