Alëna Sokolova is a contemporary painter based in Boston, originally from Siberia, Russia. Her practice bridges classical oil painting with post-digital aesthetics, examining the tension between material tradition and contemporary visual culture.

Through detailed studies of botanical forms — from full bloom to decay — she explores transformation, impermanence, and the fragile equilibrium between states.

She integrates glazing, mixed media, and metallic leaf with graphic structures that reference the visual language of the digital age. In selected works, she extends the painted surface through Augmented Reality, where static botanical forms come to life, creating a dialogue between past and present, the living and the inanimate, organic nature and algorithmic logic.

A member of the SoWa Artists Studios in Boston, she has exhibited in the United States and internationally. Her works are held in private collections across the US, UK, Russia, and Europe.

Statement 

My practice is grounded in oil painting, in the accumulation of translucent glazes and the way light moves through them. Through detailed studies of botanical forms, from full bloom to decay, I investigate transformation, impermanence, and the fragile equilibrium between states. I work with the classical genre of floral still life, but place it in dialogue with the language of contemporary digital culture.

Metallic leaf in my work functions not as ornament, but as an active reflective surface that interacts with light and the direction of the viewer's gaze. Dark elements, by contrast, absorb light, creating tension and a shifting balance between visibility and disappearance. This dialogue between emission and absorption is what I return to in painting again and again.

My painting asks to be looked at slowly. The layers accumulated on the surface of the canvas do not reveal themselves at once; they emerge gradually, as the viewer stays with the work. My task is to create a space one can enter.

In selected works, I extend the painting beyond the canvas through augmented reality. Butterflies, dragonflies, and ladybugs — rendered in oil in the tradition of the Old Dutch masters — begin to move in AR and continue to exist in digital space, living there an endless life. This work is built on a series of contrasts that concern me: between past and present, the living and the inanimate, the flat and the dimensional, the organic chaos of nature and the mathematical logic of the algorithm. The viewer encounters the same work across different states of reality and is left with a question: Where does the real end, and the constructed begin?