Dobreva has gained international attention for her eruptive paintings, in which she interweaves various painting genres and art historical styles – into a mysterious web of, at times, political, religious, and psychological charged references. Her art boldly explores materiality and process as carriers of meaning, with lava-like and rotating forms that evoke dynamism and energy, alternating between representation and abstraction.

In her art, Dobreva explores the highly toxic liaison of identity and ideology that is so conspicuously present in our time, questioning the aesthetic repertoire of gestures, symbols, and physical or gender ideals inherent in it and handed down in art historical subjects. Physicality, the colour of flesh and skin, and the highly visceral effect of her gestures are characteristic of her paintings, in which bodies almost invariably writhe in struggle, rebel in lust and ecstasy, or fall into lethargy in submission to the pictorial event. Her meticulously choreographed compositions and the extreme painterly effect created by the pasty application of paint and fluid brushstrokes evoke the sensuality of Italian Baroque as well as the metaphysically charged gestures of New York School Abstract Expressionism.

The artist combines archetypal motifs from the art historical canon with everyday motifs from popular and consumer culture. The focus is on the sexualized female body, around which all the „stories and myths“ of power, misogyny, environmental destruction, and refugee misery seem to be organized. An intangible omnipresence of the uncontrollable determines the visual events – dominated and connected only by the energetic materiality of colour. The focus is not on the iconographically suggested subjects, the supposed stories and myths depicted, but on the constant transformation as an essential feature of our and all human existence. Dobreva expresses this in her fleshy, transcending, all-encompassing formal language, as she herself explains, „[…] the figurative becomes distorted and dissolves. Everything in my paintings exists in this space of constant transformation.“

Dobreva subtly explores the dynamics involved in traditional readings of art historical themes, especially by questioning the normative notions of femininity, masculinity, and gender that are firmly anchored in the aesthetic language of colour and form. What seems so apparent at first glance remains ambiguous upon closer inspection.

(Text: Marcus Trautner)