Anna Volkova’s porcelain flowers caused an absolute sensation at stand 150 of the renowned Brussels gallery Artimo Fine Arts at BRAFA 2026. A contemporary artist and ceramicist living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, she is known for her exquisite porcelain flowers and floral compositions. Born in St Petersburg, she received both classical and contemporary art training at the prestigious Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. She has lived in the Netherlands since the late 1990s, where she has developed her own distinctive artistic language.

Gifted, modest and intelligent to the core, Anna is unyielding only when naïve people ask about the secret behind her ultra-fine, fragile porcelain. At such moments she recalls the creature of God from which her surname derives (Volkova in Russian comes from “wolf”). The rest of the time she is a tireless worker: every flower is made by hand and, after firing, acquires a unique form and such a soft, matte texture that one might think a living bloom is before them.

Her love for Amsterdam — where the ceramicist has lived for more than 30 years — and for seventeenth-century painting has allowed her flowers to step out of Dutch still lifes. They resonate with the aesthetics and allegories of floral still lifes from the Dutch Golden Age, created with meticulous attention to form, colour and the fleeting nature of blossoms. They appear like freshly cut tulips and wisteria from a bouquet by one of the most celebrated still-life masters, Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621). These allusions transform fragile porcelain into a visual dialogue with the traditions of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, where flowers served as symbols of beauty, memento mori, and of the city’s rich visual history — not forgetting tulip mania. Anna’s flowers — incredibly delicate, jeweller-like sculptures of poppies, peonies and hyacinths — are made possible by her own unique ceramic recipe.

Specially for Artimo Fine Arts, a gallery focuses on marble and bronze sculpture, Anna created the porcelain collection Madame de Pompadour, inspired by a marble bust of Louis XV’s favourite proposed by the gallery’s director, Georges Van Cauwenbergh. The bust was made in Carrara marble by the Italian sculptor Carlo Nicoli (1843–1915) and bears the signature “C. Nicoli 1889”. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (1721–1764) supported the famous Sèvres porcelain manufactory and encouraged its craftsmen to begin producing porcelain flowers — an idea they successfully realised. Today, we might well call Madame de Pompadour an influencer.

Artimo Fine Arts is a Brussels-based private family gallery whose history dates back to 1985, when it was founded by the industrialist and passionate collector Marcel Van Cauwenbergh. What began as a personal passion for art gradually evolved into a professional dynasty: the business was continued by his son, Luc Van Cauwenbergh, under whom the gallery strengthened its position, expanded its international connections, and confidently entered the circle of major European art fairs. Today, it’s held by the charismatic Georges Van Cauwenbergh, a representative of the third generation, who has developed Artimo into a highly specialised authority in nineteenth- and twentieth-century sculpture. The gallery is known for its focus on rare, museum-quality works, particularly marble and bronze sculpture, combining market expertise with an almost scholarly approach to attribution, quality, and provenance. Participation in leading fairs, including BRAFA, is for Artimo a way of advancing the conversation about sculpture as an independent realm of high-level collecting.