Marianna Ignataki
Exhibition & Residency:
January 1 – Febraury 28, 2014

Sexual and surreal, Marianna Ignataki’s works on paper exude fantastical ideas of life and the self upon confronting the stagnancies of our present day world. Working primarily with color pencil, Ignataki’s facility with this graphite medium enables her to photo-realistically enter a subliminal world, one filled with symbolic images of her own mythology.

Ignataki was born in 1977 in Thessaloniki, Greece and holds a DNSEP in Fine Arts from the Saint-Etienne Fine Art School in France. She lives and works in Beijing, China. Often, Marianna Ignataki incorporates a variety of media in her work such as drawing, performance, and installation using ready-made and sculptural objects in order to create surrealistic environments. She also utilizes the presence of symbolic objects as a significant aspect in her entire body of work. Often, there is an implication of an unspecified – or even perverse – eroticism, which does not concern sexuality in the sense of erotic desire, but instead our instincts and our hidden dark side. These underlying themes have been transparent in many of Ignataki’s projects and solo exhibitions.

Her work has been presented in several exhibitions in Europe and China. Recent shows include: ‘The end of magic’ at Outpost, Amsterdam 2012 (solo); ‘Women’s lines’ at Pantocrátor gallery, Barcelona 2012; ‘Sphinx’ at Fake Space, Beijing 2011 (solo), ‘This joke ain’t funny anymore’ at Zina Athanassiadou gallery, Thessaloniki 2009 (solo); The Beautiful is just the first degree of the Terrible’ at the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki 2009; ‘Women only’- Leonidas Beltsios collection at Margaris Art Foundation, Amfilochia 2008 and the 13. Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, Bari 2008.