Svetlana Sokolovskaya is a fearless warrior in the fight for honest erotic art, and uses her paintings to explore as honestly as she can the pleasures, pains, and pure playfulness of shared sensuality. She is also an experimenter with the forms of the human body, especially of genitalia, and her compositions at the end of this selection are brilliant examples of the use of repeated forms to create highly original and thought-provoking artworks, worthy to sit alongside Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray and René Magritte.

When asked to share her thoughts about her work and artistic experience for the campaigning group Artists Against Censorship, Svetlana Sokolovskaya writes:

My intimate art is regularly exposed to discrimination by Facebook and Instagram. They want to make me into a criminal for what I paint. Photos of my artworks have regularly been removed and blocked for months at a time, which does considerable damage to my work and my reputation. Why should the depiction of feelings and emotions of a sexual character be considered lewd? And who defines what is lewd? An image on a canvas does not in itself make the subject lewd. Sexual feelings arise in the brain of the spectator, and what significance those feelings have – lewd, cynical, exciting, rough, sexual – depends on the individual viewer. A female vagina or a male penis is just as much an essential part of a body as an ear, a nose, a hand or a foot. Why can’t it be represented in the same way? Genitals are only ‘dirty’ or create guilt because of our upbringing; we were all born with them and live with them every day. Nowadays we live in a world of ubiquitous surveillance and image recording, yet certain subjects are still taboo and forbidden from being seen in public. Our society is a crowd of ‘naked kings’, owning modern gadgets but insisting on the observance of nineteenth century prudishness, allowing artists to be humiliated by the ignorance of a small group of sexually uncertain people with power in the internet community.