Since antiquity, creative energy has been associated with generation, transformation, becoming and femininity. Women have long been linked to the rhythms of nature, intuition, and the cycles of life—forces seen as mutable, fluid, and deeply connected to lived experience. Femina ad Artem brings this perspective into contemporary practice, presenting female artistic creation as a space where material, perception, and intuition converge.
The exhibition gathers six artists whose works explore creativity as a living, transformative process. Anna Bochkova envisions spaces of tenderness, empathy, and community, exploring belonging and relational resilience. Kalina Danailova creates intimate micro-narratives that reflect on presence, identity, and care. Maria Cristiana Fioretti uses light and color to guide the gaze between surface and depth. Polina Goldstein activates abstract fields where gesture and rhythm engage body and emotion. Li Ramet translates body, sensation, and emotion into spaces between figuration and abstraction. Raffaella Surian's works trace memory and resilience through repetition and transformation.
These artists show creativity not as spectacle, but as an embodied, intuitive, and relational force—a field where perception, emotion, and imagination meet, and where female artistic practice opens new ways of experiencing the world.
Anna Bochkova (1995, Rostov-on-Don) is a visual artist living and working in Hamburg. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture with distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a second MFA from the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Her artistic practice investigates how spaces emerge through relationships between sculptures, objects, and materials, enabling new narrative and emotional constellations. Bochkova's work often draws on myths, symbolism, and sensory experience to create open, ambiguous environments. Central to her practice is the question of how tenderness and care can function as resilient gestures in contexts shaped by hardship, whether in the prefabricated housing estates of her childhood or in speculative dystopian futures. She frequently works with materials such as paper-mâché, ceramics, textiles, and metal, positioning fragility and resistance as interconnected forces. Her figures, often human-like yet uncanny, reflect experiences of migration, displacement, and transformation. Themes of care, community, feminism, and utopia recur throughout her work, with sculptures understood as mediators of emotional and collective encounters. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Eigen+Art Lab Berlin, Belvedere 21 Vienna, the Austrian Cultural Forum Rome, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof Hamburg, Spazio Serra Milan, and Kunsthaus Wien.
Kalina Danailova (1985, Sofia, Bulgaria) lives and works in Milan. She graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera and has developed her practice through performance, painting, and installation, focusing on embroidery since 2023. She is an ordained Buddhist nun in the Japanese Shingon tradition, a scholar of Buddhist philosophy, and the founder of Expressive Meditation, a method that interweaves art and awareness. Her research explores the boundary between the visible and the invisible, translating inner states into signs, surfaces, and rhythms. Her works emerge from a daily meditation practice and take shape as visual micro-narratives suspended between material presence and spiritual dimension. Presence, identity, and care are central themes in her work, which draws from everyday experience and relationships, transforming them into a visual language balanced between discipline and spontaneity, silence and vitality. Within these intimate spaces, repetitive gesture becomes a tool for listening and awareness. Her color palette, characterized by delicate tones and light combinations, introduces a visual quality that is at once playful and capable of balancing the meditative dimension of the work. Pastel hues, irregular dots, and almost childlike marks alternate with denser textures, creating a continuous dialogue between rigor and spontaneity, stillness and vital tension. Her works have been exhibited in various international contexts, including Spazio Oberdan, Palazzo della Permanente, Castello di Morsasco, the National Palace of Culture (Sofia), and Maria Frozen Gallery (Berlin).
Maria Cristiana Fioretti (born 1966 in Cingoli, Marche) is a painter and sculptor who lives and works between Milan and Menton, France. Since 2000, she has been Professor of Chromatology at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan. Her artistic path began in the 1980s, and she has held numerous solo and international exhibitions. Notable among them is the 2010 exhibition "Light Abstr-Action" at the Casa dell'Energia in Milan, later hosted at the Medieval Castle "Carlo V" in Lecce. In 2013, she presented the site-specific work "Sensorial Space" at the 55th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Bembo. In 2010, the Municipality of Milan selected her for the program "I talenti delle donne" and organized the exhibition "Il Colore dell'Acqua" at the Civic Aquarium of Milan. In 2023, the Municipality of Menton (France) organized the exhibition "H2ORIZON" at the Palais de l'Europe. She also participated in the 2024 and 2025 editions of Art Basel – ARTMIAMI, Miami (FL), U.S.A. Fioretti's work focuses on emotional and perceptual states explored through light and color, conceived as forms of sensory knowledge. Her works guide the viewer's gaze between surface and depth, sky and sea, revealing threshold lines that mark moments of transition and transformation. Inspired by Kandinsky's anti-materialist philosophy, she creates works in which spiritual abstraction is balanced with physical presence, emphasizing creativity as an intuitive and natural process. The use of elements such as water and earth evokes a fluid and cyclical mode of thought, rooted in direct experience and attentive observation. Her works invite a slow and immersive engagement, where light and color become spaces of inner resonance and connection with the natural world.
Polina Goldstein (1998, Moscow, Russia) is an artist and architect whose practice creates a dialogue between spatial design and abstract painting. Born in Moscow and now based in Milan, she develops a body of work centered on the relationship between form, color, and emotional resonance. After graduating from the Moscow Architectural Institute (MARKHI) in 2021, she continued her studies at the Politecnico di Milano. Living between Moscow and Milan, Goldstein absorbs influences from both cultural contexts, shaping a visual language that engages with different aesthetic traditions. Her paintings are built through broad, layered brushstrokes in which color defines space even before form emerges. Her architectural training is evident in her careful compositional balance: chromatic areas interact like volumes, creating tensions, interruptions, and moments of stability. Her palette often plays on contrasts between soft tones, such as dusty blues, milky pinks, muted greens, and denser, darker fields. This generates a visual rhythm that moves between lightness and depth. In her work, abstraction is not a departure from reality, but a way of organizing space. Color becomes a constructive element, while gesture introduces variations and imperfections that disrupt structural rigidity. The result is a body of work that sustains an active tension between control and spontaneity, planning and intuition, inviting the viewer to enter a dynamic and layered visual field.
Li Ramet (born in San Juan, Argentina) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, textile, sculpture, and immersive installation. Based in Ibiza, her work brings together formal artistic training and somatic research, creating spaces that move between material presence and embodied experience. She graduated in Fine Arts from the National University of Cuyo in Mendoza (2003–2008), where she developed a strong foundation in traditional artistic disciplines alongside studies in contemporary dance and the Feldenkrais method—an influence that continues to inform the physical and gestural dimension of her work. Further studies in art therapy at the University of Coahuila in Mexico deepened her interest in intuition and the transformative potential of creative processes, leading to the development of ArtSessions, a project that bridges therapeutic practice and studio-based research. Ramet's work has been exhibited internationally, including Argentina (Mendoza, San Juan), France (Marseille, Aux de Provence), NYC (Manhattan), Turkey (Istambul), Germany (Hamburg). Her artistic practice emerges from an ongoing dialogue between body, matter, energy, and space. Through painting and expanded media, Ramet explores how gesture, presence, and change unfold within the creative process, allowing materials to guide the image as it develops. Color and movement operate as both language and energy, shaping compositions that exist between control and release, form and dissolution. Her works translate personal experience into abstract, sensual spaces where body, sensation, and emotion coexist, privileging states of becoming over fixed images—hovering between material and immaterial, presence and disappearance.
Raffaella Surian (born 1960 in Padua, Italy) is an Italian artist whose practice unfolds across printmaking, drawing, painting, and artists' books. After graduating from NABA in 1983, she worked for ten years as an assistant professor, closely collaborating with Professors Valentini, Benedetti, and Della Torre. During this period, her engagement with the Milanese art scene intensified, and her work was presented in numerous exhibitions, marking a formative phase in the development of her artistic language. After settling in Monza, she began her professional career in graphic art, presenting several solo exhibitions, including a show of etchings at the Salone Civico del Palazzo degli Studi. Surian's practice is rooted in the discipline of printmaking and drawing, gradually expanding toward painting and book-based works. Her visual language is shaped by a constant dialogue between structure and freedom, where technical rigor gives way to expressive gesture and chromatic intensity. Pauses, interruptions, and returns play a central role in her process, allowing gesture to become fluid, color instinctive, and composition narrative. In her recent work, Surian explores memory, place, and poetry, allowing images to emerge in response to lived experience and literary references. Creation becomes an act of resilience—a necessary return rather than a linear continuation. Her practice embodies a cyclical and persistent creative force, deeply human and attentive to transformation over time.
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