Artist Biography

Ilana Razbash is an artist and practising architect born in Melbourne, Australia. Her oil paintings explore the melding of “the real” with “the imagined”, often through themes of architecture, place and Jewish spirituality. 

Through both systematic process and deeply intuitive exploration, Razbash searches to reveal the urgent work that she is compelled to make. In her surrealist-like style, Razbash’s compositions combine memory and photographic reference from her personal archive, observation from life, model sittings, and en plein air landscape. The narratives behind her work directly references jewish text, anchoring both big and small ideas in 4000 years of scholarship, wisdom and tradition.

She trained under local soviet immigrant artists Margarita Krivitsky and Joseph Edelman (b.1931 - d.2020) who shaped Razbash’s early practice and emergence of her own style. Razbash holds a Bachelor of Architectural Design with Distinction and Master of Architecture with Distinction from RMIT University where she took further electives from the Fine Art Faculty during her architectural training. 

Her artistic practice is grounded in research and architectural rigour, realising her imagined speculative worlds via a design through painting process.

Razbash continues to create new bodies of work and prepare for exhibitions whilst leading Melbourne-based architecture firm Studio Razbash as Director. Her work is held in local and interstate private collections.