Marianna Ignataki

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. Consumed by the psycho-emotional, specifically loneliness, helplessness, agony, passivity and despair, she frequently uses women or mythically created, deviant forms of the female self to play protagonist in a magic and ritual filled sphere.  Given the occultism that fills each of her drawn works, it is only fit that symmetry and geometry play an integral role in her quest to identify and release the emotions of her own mythology into the world which she contextualizes herself.

 Entering into the realm of performance and ready-made-object installations, Ignataki brings her mystical world into a realist realm, one that can be experienced and touched, so to bring the self deeper into the throws of a personal lore.

                                                        by Zandie Brockett, independent curator, Beijing, June 2012