Dzina Liaonava

About

Dinka, born Dzina Liaonava (also known as Dina Leonova) in 1988 in Vladivostok, then part of the USSR (now Russia). Resides and works in Warsaw, Poland.

Belarusian contemporary painter Dinka (b. 1988, Vladivostok, USSR) currently resides and works in Warsaw, Poland, and London, UK. Her work primarily focuses on the human body, portraiture, vulnerability, and impermanence. Through personal narratives and everyday scenes, Dinka explores the ambiguity and complexity of human nature. She embraces the potential for accidents in her art, leaving room for interpretation and allowing her subjects to appear both fading and emerging, beautiful and flawed, real and imaginative. Dinka primarily works with watercolors on smooth, all-medium paper or canvas. She often prepares her own watercolor paint by mixing dry pigments with gum arabic.

Dinka’s visual style is characterized by fluid, gestural brushwork that creates deep emotional engagement. Her wet-on-wet technique allows colors and shapes to bleed and merge. Drawing inspiration from family photographs and memories, the blurred boundaries of her forms evoke feelings of nostalgia and fragility. A limited, muted color palette and loose mark-making serve as her visual trademarks. Her paintings explore themes of self-portraiture, identity, and motherhood, focusing on the passage of time and the challenge of capturing fleeting moments.

Trained as an architect, Dinka completed her BA and MA in Architecture in Minsk, Belarus, in 2011 and 2012. In 2024, she was awarded the prestigious Chevening Scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom in the MA Painting program at the Royal College of Art (2024–2025). Her first solo exhibition took place at HOS Gallery in Warsaw, Poland, in January 2025.