Stefania Andreev

My work is defined by personal reflection, contemplation, and intimacy. Through personified and stylized self-portraiture, I capture what it feels like to be in my body or mind. As I reflect on moments in my life, I question ideas of self, individual experience, femininity, and painting. I create figurative work on all scales, from small watercolor portraits to large acrylic figurative canvases. My work often depicts a singular figure, myself, in a cropped and condensed composition, reflecting my life experience or the human experience. My practice reflects how I navigate the world as a young painter, woman, and person.

Hands and eyes are recurring motifs that ground my practice in the sensory experiences of touch and vision. These elements are not merely symbolic but serve as extensions of myself and how I navigate the world. The large or exaggerated hands in many of my pieces represent my hyper awareness of the actions of my hands, whether I am engaging with my environment or existing socially. The importance of sight, both in my daily life and my work, has to do with my Western philosophical understanding of the privilege of sight over other senses. “To see, fully and accurately, is to know.” Whether or not I agree with this doctrine, my life is still dictated by sight as a visual artist. For me to be seen is to exist.
I create self-portraits to be noticed, but compose the painting to be vague enough as not to be fully seen or understood. I paint from memory. Thus, I do not engage with realism as truth or reflection as knowledge; instead, I acknowledge that I am painting my view of the world through my mind's eye, but that my subjectivity greatly warps my perception of reality. Thus, my practice becomes paradoxical.

I explore layers of paradoxes: myself, humanity, life, and art. The desire to be seen while wanting to remain invisible, the complexity of womanhood, where self-expression is often viewed as performative, the tension between confidence and ego, and the contradiction of painting itself—an attempt to capture reality that inevitably alters and distorts it. These ideas of paradox are a throughline in my work, through the subject matter that deals with these questions. Self-portraiture deals with the ego paradox as I question my depiction of myself as a means to an end. In my painting, I explore wanting to be seen to exist, but leaving out enough details to be imperceptible. Finally, this practice of exploring myself has led me to be hypocritical and observant of my actions as a woman, noticing socially ingrained rituals of feminine performance.The feminine experience is embedded in my practice. Through self-portraiture, I question and abstract myself on canvas, occupying the roles of both artist and muse in a non-gendered, balanced relationship. 

I often use literal textures to create a dialogue between our physical reality and the psychological realm of the paintings. In Paradox of ego, real sand is embedded in the ground of the painting, which then acts as the literal ground the figure is standing on. The sand creates a 3D texture but is simultaneously flattened through its literal depiction, building a bridge between physical and psychological. 

Painting becomes a way to externalize my reality and self, allowing the work to become abstracted and distanced. Through this abstraction, the work enables the paintings to be more open, mysterious, and take on a life beyond me. This speaks to a broader human experience—an experience marked by paradoxical and incomprehensible structures of nature and society.