“Exit to the City” is the phrase a person sees when leaving a railway station or emerging from the metro. In the bustle of everyday life, this combination of words is rarely perceived as anything more than a functional visual sign, a directional marker. Everyday routine blurs our focus on those things, events, and images that we encounter too often, leaving them with only the most convenient and familiar connotation—or excluding them from our attention altogether. At the same time, by stepping outside this pattern and attempting to look more closely at those aspects of reality that usually seem uninteresting, one may discover their beauty, novelty, or strangeness. This practice of searching for something other within the ordinary has long been established in contemporary theory and art: the French philosopher Guy Debord developed the concept of the dérive (the abandonment of habitual routes in favor of “aimless” movement in order to gain a new perspective and new impressions) as early as the 1950s. And yet, throughout all these years, the subject has continued to captivate artists working across a wide variety of genres.

Ira Lensberr continues to develop this tradition. The exhibition Exit to the City is centered on “strangeness” as an emotional condition experienced by the contemporary urban dweller—the “tired person.” The artist focuses on the feeling of derealization that arises from visual oversaturation with the familiar scenery of everyday urban life—industrial zones and architectural heritage, roads, construction sites, and nature. The obsessively recurring images that appear from one work to another—fire, a bus stop, a car, a resting place consisting of two chairs and a table—underscore the neurotic character of the strangeness of everyday life.

In her attempt to capture these states of the contemporary city dweller, Ira Lensberr is above all interested in everything directly real. Not a single element or situation in her works is fictional—they are all drawn from the smartphone photo archives of the artist and her friends. The sense of “strangeness” is created through the compositional collage of images taken from these photographs. Inspired by the art of the Leningrad collective New Artists, Ira Lensberr turns to abrupt brushstrokes, deliberate simplification, and the distortion of proportions and forms. By employing these devices, she intensifies the anxious tension within her works. At the same time, in a number of the paintings, strangeness and nervousness coexist with a lyrical interpretation of the urban landscape and a romantic vision of the city’s outskirts and industrial zones, which Ira Lensberr draws from the Soviet industrial landscape painting of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as from the artists of the Arefiev Circle.