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Karina Akopyan was born in Moscow, Russia and moved to the UK in 2005. She graduated with a degree in Illustration from Kingston University but now works in a variety of mediums. 

With an aesthetic rooted in fetishism and decorative style of Russian folk Karina Akopyan’s work features painting, photography and costume pieces, the series is a bold questioning of sexuality, religion, ritual, and iconography – in all their jarring coexistence yet inevitable convergence. Debating the preservation of values and traditions, as either a beautiful necessity or, rather, a deceleration of progress, Karina’s work is also a dissection of a subconscious personality and multicultural identity.

The artist’s use of dark symbolism and sinister subject matter plays on such contrasts as beauty and ugliness, femininity and aggression, ancient and modern, history and tales. It is open to interpretation, evoking also the Jungian concept of the unconscious as a dynamic rebalancing of the rational psyche. In such a sense the oneiric symbols in Akopyan’s work form a mise-en-scène of the universal problems of birth, curiosity, grief, sin, search for enlightenment and death.

This piece was inspired by the lyrics and chaos of  ‘Pretty on the Inside’ as well as album artwork colour scheme. 

Karina often uses a symbol of Russian doll as a femme symbol turned on its head. Instead of dozens of other dolls inside the nesting doll there are guts and flesh - she is scary, she is angry, she is a rebel, she is a real person, not a doll.