Manole Art Gallery

Irena says:

"For me as an artist working in a realistic manner, the image of a person is associated with the specificity of his sex, age, time and place of action of the character's picture. These conventions prevented my striving to depict the psychological states of a person with symbolic signs and objects working at a subconscious level. The contradiction between the desire for realism - on the one hand, and the transmission of the generalized psychological traits that characterize a person throughout the history of his development - on the other hand, led me to a search for a character that allows me to bypass restrictions connected with realism without breaking at the same time with him. Ancient Egyptian images of a half-man, half-animal, prompted me to look for the image I needed among animals. In my search for animals in the world culture, I discovered that the hare is a character that appears in many fairy tales and myths of the peoples of the world, from America to the Far East and from Africa to Europe. Myths connect a hare with the moon, sky, and sun, its image can be found on antique ceramics, coins, hieroglyphs, as well as in national histories. Especially I was attracted by the fact that in these tales and myths the hare combines the femininity and masculinity and reflects all the advantages and disadvantages of human nature.

I use images of animals to tell about people,
furthermore, certainly about relations between a man and a woman.
After all, we are all a bit animals...

Pyramids, that I create, have a philosophical and spiritual concept that reflects a balance of opposing forces in human life.
Each element of a pyramid is a symbol and has an implicit meaning.
For example:
- The bird symbolizes spirituality.
- The key is the answer to the questions.
The human desire for harmonious development is emphasized in the paintings. All elements of a pyramid are interconnected.
However, each viewer can find their own correlation of these elements."