Andreana Dobreva

Bulgarian artist Andreana Dobreva (b. 1982, Sliven) is a painter whose preferred medium is oil on canvas. She studied classical painting in Bulgaria and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (Akademie der Bildenden Künste München). 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 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 gradation of colour in between, are of constant interest to her.

Observing closely the masters of Italian Baroque painting from the 17th and 18th centuries, she experiments with complicated compositions and brave juxtapositions between intense primary colours, creating works bursting with elemental energy. The figurative acts as the vessel for the painting; she finds the tension between abstraction and figuration in the working process, where the figurative becomes distorted and dissolves.