Marianna Ignataki was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied Architecture at the Technische Universität in Vienna, Austria and Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts of Saint-Etienne, France. Between 2010-2017 she was based in Beijing, China. She now lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Greece.

Working primarily in drawing, painting and sculpture, Marianna Ignataki’s practice enables her to enter a vague, subliminal world, filled with images of her own mythology. Her work ranges from minimalistic scenes and portraits to exaggerated, kitsch, Rococo inspired compositions. It explores themes of identity and the perception of self, the other side; a dream that turns to nightmare, the attraction to terror, the fascination with carnival, the freedom and the ambiguous feelings provoked by the use of masks. The works are mainly anthropocentric, with female or ambiguously-gendered protagonists that resemble witches, animals or hybrids. Often, an unspecified or even perversive eroticism is implied, one that does not concern sexuality in the sense of sexual act but the mental state of erotic desire; our instincts, or a hidden dark side. These vague, surrealistic scenes, play with the notion of the absurd and combine seemingly heterogeneous elements which are subtly linked through compositional elements. By adding unexpected details with a sense of dark humour, the initial meaning of seemingly normal scenes is inverted or perverted, resulting to ironic, bizarre and grotesque situations.