Artist Karina (Dilan) Savina is a distinctive voice in contemporary art, and her recent exhibitions–Women in Art Biennale London in 2025 and Colour 2025 at the CICA Museum in South Korea in October–further cement her growing global recognition. These significant milestones join an expanding list of international exhibitions, including her participation in the Belgrade Biennale in June 2025 and shows across Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together, they reflect the clarity and resonance of her artistic vision.
Based in Belgrade, Serbian by residence and Russian by birth, Savina is an artist and illustrator whose work bridges the emotional, the symbolic and the metaphysical. Born in Moscow in 1992 and trained at the prestigious Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, she carries forward a classical foundation, transforming it into something fluid, ethereal, and deeply introspective. In 2025, she received the Leonardo da Vinci Universal Artist Prize at the National Museum of Science and Technology “Leonardo da Vinci” in Milan. This globally recognised award recognises her technical ability, creative imagination and innovative style.
For Savina, art is not merely a practice but a process of translation, an intuitive channelling of inner states into visual form. She works across acrylic, oils, watercolour, and digital media, allowing each medium’s character to guide the emotional qualities of the piece. Her paintings and digital works feel alive with movement: washes of watercolour that bleed like shifting thoughts or layered digital compositions that glow as though illuminated from within. Across all her mediums, there is a consistent quest to express what he calls the “subtle inner psyche at the centre of human existence.”
Savina describes herself as “A seeker, a dreamer, and an explorer of the unseen.” This philosophy is evident throughout her practice. She is drawn to Symbolism, mythic references, and esoteric visual language; yet her work remains accessible through its pure sensorial appeal. Her use of colour is central. Watercolour is her most fluid and emotionally sensitive medium, allowing her to express the intangible complexity of human feeling. Through this, she pursues what she sees as a spiritual mission: to expand the viewer’s inner landscape, to create a universal emotional connection, and to reveal the often-unspoken harmony between human beings and the natural world.
This emphasis on colour and Symbolism made her participation in COLOR 2025 at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA Museum) particularly fitting. Running from 1–19 October 2025, the exhibition presented an international roster of artists exploring the expressive, psychological, and cultural dimensions of colour across painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation.
Since 2017, the Colour exhibitions at CICA Museum have highlighted artists experimenting with colour’s transformative potential, its ability to shape memory, perception, emotion and meaning.
Dilan exhibited two digital artworks in the Colour exhibition–One Summer Day and Light Dream–pieces that exemplify her sensorial approach to colour and inner states. One Summer Day presents a dusty, rust-toned landscape that seems to let the desert dissolve upward into a blue sky, capturing the feeling of a summer evening as warm air lifts in anticipation of a more fabulous sunset. In contrast, Light Dream glows softly with sky- and cloud-colored hues, inviting the viewer into a portal that drifts between fantasy and reality, subtly shifting one’s perception.
Savina’s work was shown alongside international artists including Eva Aguero, Neena atMA, Bang In Gyun, Blankmalaysia, Berend Bode, Maria Bologna, Chaee, Choi Ji Eun, Shawn Edrington, Matias Estrace, Alana Fitzgerald, Gerald Hushlak, and Olga Isupova. Within this diverse group, Savina’s contributions stood out for their mixture of dreamlike visual aesthetics and inner psychological resonance, a merging of symbolic storytelling with contemporary digital expression.
Just a month earlier, she exhibited with Artio Gallery at the Women in Art Biennale London, held from 11–14 September 2025. This international exhibition celebrates the work of women whose creative perspectives are shaping contemporary art. The Biennale aims to strengthen the ongoing cultural movement toward gender balance in the arts by foregrounding the ingenuity, diversity, and shared humanity of women artists worldwide. Savina’s art, rooted in emotional intelligence and symbolic exploration, aligned seamlessly with the Biennale’s vision.
Savina exhibited two works at the Women in Art Biennale London: Joy of the Source and The Soul’s Journey. These images feel otherworldly: cosmological and ethereal. In The Soul’s Journey, she conveys the full intensity and emotional resonance of the soul’s path: an endless, unconditional fascination with rebirth, creation, new experience, and the return to wholeness. Each work becomes an attempt to visualise subtle inner states and the ever-shifting contours of perception and reality.
Savina’s paintings often juxtapose precision with spontaneity: delicate fine-line drawing sits beside organic splashes of watercolour that seem to move across the page like emotional tides. Running through her imagery are echoes of Symbolist and Surrealist artists: hints of Gustav Klimt’s gilded emotionality, Frida Kahlo’s introspective Symbolism and Leonora Carrington’s mystical dreamworlds peek out from Dilan’s works. Will of Nature is an example of a work evoking Carrington’s surrealism. Motifs such as swans, butterflies, and pears appear in her work and are often placed against cosmic or otherworldly backdrops. Dilan depicts these motifs from nature as metaphors for rebirth, transformation and femininity, and her work traverses imagery from the natural world with dreamscapes.
Leonora Carrington once wrote: “Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds.” Dilan seems to embody this sentiment. She often speaks about painting in a trance-like state, describing how emotions “pour out through water, feelings turn into colour, images become metaphors, and the very process transforms into a weightless veil of hope: reaching toward the future, carrying you along with it.”
Karina Savina’s art is both expressive and contemplative: an invitation into a world where intuition guides form, colour communicates emotion, and symbols articulate the inner dimensions of the human experience. As her international presence grows, so too does recognition of her singular voice by internationally respected curators and institutions, signified by her inclusion in the Women in Art Biennale London and selection for the CICA Museum Colour exhibition in South Korea: one that speaks gently yet powerfully, offering viewers a moment of introspection and an encounter with the spiritual potential of visual art.
Savina is undoubtedly an artist with a strong visual language and an international footprint: an artist whose sensitivity, imagination, and commitment to exploring the human psyche continue to shape a body of work that is as soulful as it is visually captivating.