Irina Zatulovskaya is one of the most distinctive painters working in Moscow.  Her exhibition at Matthew Bown Gallery is her first in London since her solo show at the RAAB Gallery in 1989.

Zatulovskaya's paintings are not simply images revealed on an anonymous surface. Their utilitarian supports – sheet-iron panels ripped from roofs, reclaimed wood, stone –  make of them three-dimensional bodies with a specific sense of gravity, presence in space and relationship to the wall. They are thoroughly at home in the white cube. In this sense they acknowledge and work – or rather, have fun – with the principles of painterly Modernism. Yet these obdurate supports also embody a kind of archaism or historicism. Their resistance to the laconic strokes of the artist’s brush invokes ancient techniques of pictorial art, from before the age of canvas: as Zatulovskaya has put it, they stand for her lack of opportunity to paint on walls.

Above all, the paintings are a dialogue between the concerns of the artist ­– her love of Cavafy, say, or of the Russian winter –  and a particular natural history, that of the reclaimed support. They seem to be executed with the directness and heedlessness of a house-painter; yet these vivid interventions into nature's re-cycling of man-made artifacts have a quality of tentativeness, of second thoughts, even of fatalism: they suggest nostalgia for the idea of civilization itself.

There are several points of contact between Zatulovskaya’s painting and the Russian context: Larionov’s Primitivism, for example, or (if we consider her combinations of image and text), the icon, woodcut (lubok) and propaganda poster. But such references seem no more relevant to her oeuvre than her own characterization of the history of art as ”the history of exceptions”. Anyone encountering Zatulovskaya’s paintings will have the sense that they could only have been made in Russia, but in Russia itself there is nothing like them.