Dimitra Liogka (b. 1997, Kavala) paints bodies as if they’re always slipping away from their own edges. Her hair-like brushwork, foregrounded rather than subdued, asserts itself as both image and gesture — strands rendered with clarity even as the figure beneath is veiled. This act of making hair present, with all its layered associations of power, seduction, and repulsion, becomes a quiet form of resistance. The surface turns into both threshold and veil, holding the body in a state of suspended visibility.
This tension between presence and erosion unsettles inherited ideals of the body as stable, whole, and idealised, rendering it mutable, porous, and in flux. In this precarious visibility, softness is not a neutral aesthetic quality but a site of friction. It makes the body vulnerable to desire, misreading, or control, yet it also resists being fixed, refusing to yield to a single reading. Liogka’s figures flicker between tenderness and defiance, inhabiting a terrain where softness is both an opening and a refusal — a way for the body to remain present while evading capture.
Liogka completed both her BA and MA in Painting at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and is currently pursuing her MFA at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Selected exhibitions include HAUNT (Berlin), Havet/Konstfack (Stockholm), the Old City Hall of Keratsini (Athens), the Cosmopolis Festival (Kavala), and the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece (Athens). In 2025, she was awarded the Eva och Hugo Bergmans Minnesfond grant by the Konstakademien in Stockholm.
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Images:
Details of
1-2. 𝘍𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭, 2025, oil on canvas, 100 x 120cm
3-4. 𝘙𝘦𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴, 2025, oil on linen, 60 x 50 cm
5-6. 𝘚𝘰𝘧𝘵 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵, 2025, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm
📷: Amin Yousefi (
@studiodeew )
