Iliana Dokova

The painter Iliana Dokova is a self-thought and very talented contemporary artist. She started embracing art from a very early age and her love for contemporary art and painting lasts for a lifetime.

On ArtWizard, Iliana Dokova presents her oil on canvas paintings, depicting female bodies in the style of contemporary classical realism. Iliana loves to paint stylish woman figures and faces, inspired from her soul, reminiscing of contemplation, love, tears, separation, sorrow, loneliness but also hidden desires and joy of living.

Iliana is a painter that embraces art as a way to escape from everyday life and reveals her soul. In all of her paintings we see her in her many moods and shapes.

Once she is a wanderer, another time - a lost soul, or a woman separated from her beloved, or just a female ghost, wounded, spanked, guilty, forgiven, loved, good. In Iliana's paintings, you can discover a whole palette of feminine feelings and emotions. This is why her paintings are so close to women, but are also very tempting for men wishing to have a glimpse into the female soul.

Nudity in art as well as the human form combined can be traced throughout all the eras in art, starting from pre-historic times and still being seen in today’s art, recently in photography as well.

The nude figure in art has generally reflected, with few exceptions, social standards of aesthetics as well as morality of the certain time period in the painting, sculpture and more recently photography. Just as in human history the human nude figure has been one of the principle subjects in art history for artists.

The nude figure has been represented on pre-historic statues and drawings throughout all eras since. The male nude was more commonly used in the start, especially in ancient Greece. Today's society and their morality, values and outlook on life has evolved and likewise, so has the female nude in art, lately to be more highly represented and regarded in contemporary art.

As a contemporary artist, Iliana’s expressive nude paintings are the core essence of her artistic life. Very emotional, sensual and tender, she loves to paint nude women figures. She describes the process of painting as very unique for her. She starts a painting and does not stop until it is finished.

She has some ardor for art and passion for her paintings and sits for many hours until the final stroke of the painting touches the canvas. She expresses her feminine side, her soul and always has some strong feelings when she starts a painting. Her paintings are very sensual and even sexual. Iliana embraces the night to create her figures, born from all of the sensual emotions a woman can imagine. She can make art only out of her soul and body. The sexuality in her paintings has a long-term presence in the history of modern and contemporary art.

Sexuality has been a recurrent subject in the history of art almost since the beginning of known representations. Nearly every civilization has created sexually explicit imagery, often in the context of spirituality or rituals concerning fertility, to express cultural ideals of beauty and virtue. Artists, such as Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, sought to reclaim an unrestrained sexual energy, albeit with an adolescent disregard for the humanity of their lovers. The discovery of repressed sexuality by Sigmund Freud has contributed to a contemporary culture obsessed with the sexual body. The ascent of a scientific worldview and industrialization has corresponded with rampant materialism. Each of us can examine the ways in which our relationship to sexuality, beauty, sensuality, in general, is a limiting fixation without any meaning.

When we put into prospective the paintings of Iliana, we see the contrast of painting a nude woman in a different and more sensual ways, much less objective, but more abstract and emotional. In the art history, we see that the terms of that offering are subject to conventions calculated to flatter the male viewer and to stimulate his fantasy of sexual domination. Thus, as some art critics observe, “… almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal, either literally or metaphorically, because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it ...”. This is very different in the paintings of Iliana. Her figures are more disguised, sometimes she paints portraits, that are also part of a very sensual journey. She makes her paintings as in one breath, much like some of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

All paintings of Iliana elicit a strong emotional and spiritual impression. Whether negative or positive, this is an indication that it is impacting the unconscious. As a very evolved and mature contemporary artist, the paintings of Iliana are always a good investment, as well as very fine art objects. As she starts painting only when she is moved by a deep emotion, besides being very sensual, her art is expressing all variations of human emotions – love, sadness, anger, excitement, misery, hunger for life, lust, sexuality, joy, fear.

One of the titles of her paintings says – “In this shapeless, infinite nothing, only the gray silence is screaming”, depicting the back of a delicate naked female body, so gentle as to show Iliana as a very intuitive and feminine artist.

Here are some of the exhibitions with the participation of Iliana:

• 2012 - Alfiani Gallery - Combined Music Exhibition
• 2011 - MAXI Gallery - "Born… ...woman"
• 2010 - MAXI Gallery - "Far Happiness"
• 2013, 2014 and 2015 - Hungarian Cultural Center, a joint exhibition
• 2017 - Arena di Serdica, Solo Exhibition - "Cigarette unburnt, and maybe something else"
• 2019 - Jessica Showroom - "My body is inhabiting a wanderer...", a joint exhibition with photographer Ivan Dokov