Anna Irina Russell uno, dos, tres.

Playing lies at the heart of Anna Irina Russell’s artistic practice. Throughout her work, she reclaims it as both a methodological framework and a mode of relation, resisting interpretations that reduce it to mere frivolity. As Antoni Tàpies observed in his 1967 essay El joc de saber mirar, “To play does not mean doing things ‘just because’ (…). Through play, as children, we learn to grow up. Through play, we cultivate our spirit and expand the horizons of our vision and our understanding.”

Russell’s work is deeply rooted in this sensibility. Play functions as a catalyst, shifting the habitual relationships between people, materials, and their surroundings. Often taking the form of large-scale soft inflatable sculptures that move and breathe, her practice unsettles the conventional hierarchy between artwork and audience, transforming participants into active agents: bodies that reshape the work even as they are reshaped by it.

In the sculpture Antoni Tàpies envisioned for the Oval Hall of the MNAC, he imagined an oversized sock that visitors could step inside—a hollow, perforated body conceived to be inhabited. With uno, dos, tres., Anna Irina Russell revisits this playful imaginary and brings its latent possibilities to life. The work invites us to enter Tàpies’ imagined sock and explore the inner workings of an artistic practice that is as much about learning to see through play as it is about the distinctly contemporary—and profoundly poetic—urgency of reimagining the relationships between living beings, objects, and space.

The artistic practice of Anna Irina Russell is articulated through soft sculpture and installation as a way of speculating on non-hegemonic communication processes, where air and breathing function as relational materials. His work proposes situations in which matter becomes communicative and subtly subverts the structures that usually organize the way we relate. Based on a trust in the expressive capacity of matter, his research focuses on inflatable structures that breathe, expand and waver on the threshold of collapse, attending to what resists words and overflows images: overflow, contagion and asphyxiation.

He graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona in 2015 and later took the Master in Sound Art in 2018. He is currently an artist in residence at La Escocesa (Barcelona), after having been at Hangar and Fabra i Coats. In 2025 he received the Because of Many Suns award from the Collezione Taurisano during Artorama (Marseille), and in 2022 he obtained the Miquel Casablancas Prize for the installation Contain · Overflow.

He has just inaugurated his solo exhibition The first flower is born in the air at the Can Mario Museum of the Vila Casas Foundation, curated by blanca arias. She has recently presented the solo exhibitions As elastic as a lung a Tabakalera (San Sebastian, 2025) i A contagion in Bombon Projects (Barcelona, ​​2025). He has also shown his work collectively in institutions such as the Fundació Joan Miró, Santa Mònica, La Panera, MACBA, La Casa Encendida, CCCB, among others. In 2024 he published Take a breath, an artist’s book published by Brillo Editorial.

Activity programmed as part of the Museu Tàpies series Following the Sun, entitled Uncovering the Gaze, curated by Carolina Ciuti.