Bulgarian artist Andreana Dobreva (b.1982, Sliven) is a painter whose preferred media is oil on canvas. She studied classical painting in Bulgaria and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (Akademie der Bildende Künste Munich). She currently lives and works in London.
Dobreva’s interests lie in the unpolished realities of human life and what is beneath the surface of the inner and the outer worlds. These, along with the realities of refugees, human fears and her own history, are reflected in her work. The artist executes her paintings methodically and as a physical act, rather than engaging with an idea that must be fulfilled on the canvas. The pictorial polarities of light and shadow, and the graduation of colour in between are of constant interest to her. Dobreva observes closely the masters of Italian Baroque painting from the 17th and 18th centuries, taking inspiration from them she experiments with complicated compositions, brave juxtapositions between intense primary colours and creates works bursting with elemental energy.