Svetlana Sokolovskaya was born to Russian parents and grew up in Berlin; after the family moved back to Russia she studied with the Moscow ZNUI (Заочный Народный Университет Искусств, The People’s University of the Arts by Correspondence), graduating in 1984, then at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in Georgia.

She exhibited in 1986 at Berlin’s Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft  (Society of Russian-German Friendship), and her first solo Russian exhibition was in the Izmailovsky Park Gallery in Moscow in 1995. She has since participated in exhibitions in Krasnodar, Kuban, and St Petersburg, where she now lives and works. Internationally, her work has been shown in Karlsruhe in Germany, Tel Aviv and Eilat in Israel, and in the Pop Of Art Gallery in New York. She now mostly exhibits in private galleries in St Petersburg.

Sokolovskaya calls herself a feminist artist creating intimate art at the boundaries of sensuality and pornography, painting realistic images of intimate human life in a post-modernist treatment, exploring the anatomy of human relationships, their paradoxes and internal conflicts. As she explains, ‘It is hard creating my art in an extremely conservative culture, exposed to rigid censorship and persecution from representatives of official art.’

Svetlana Sokolovskaya’s Instagram page, where she shows some of her most recent work, can be found here.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying many of the images.