trans/rococo

Furiously dynamic and sensual painting that simply overwhelms: Andreana Dobreva creates canvases of spellbinding fascination. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, her painting entraps the viewer in ingenious visual worlds, in which an astute arrangement of shape ornamentation and color interplay merge to become an optical firework.

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Via the artistic means of alienation, light/dark contrasts and compositional extremes, Dobreva firmly gets to grips with the painting of the rococo. At the forefront for her is the sensuality of the moment of perception that she evokes in the synthesis of traditional shapes from that epoch and her own pictorial concentration. Yet Dobreva does not simply work with quotations, but takes rococo works in actual existence as her starting point, transforming them in their entirety.

Her representations often seem ephemeral, like a snapshot or a fleeting moment. Only fragments of figures and scenes can be recognized, panning out into amorphous applications of paint. Dobreva’s virtuoso handling of color and the way she subtly plays with light and shadow, give her works a material quality of their own. It is not about recognition, but about the pure experience – pure sensuality. This becomes clearest in her portraits, which seem to be robbed of their most basic function: representation. Person, gender and standing are no longer clearly identifiable. The figures evolve into a pure interplay of color and shape, light and shadow.