Lifestyles and Still Life

Private View: Thursday 3 November, 6-9pm

Part of the London Festival of Bulgarian Culture

Exceptionally staged and promising a cornucopia of gastronomic and visual delights, the still life is a projection of social and lifestyle aspirations. Each and every object is there in order to fill the eye with desire and to stand still, forever creating a steady sense of wellbeing and comfort.

It is a picture created for its own sake, to remind us our own physical and material transience, which the act of consumation tries to postpone indefinitely.

This exhibition is comprised of works which together constellate a possible still life, with its various elements dispersed within the gallery space, so that each individual image - a piece of raw meat in Lubri’s photography, a tomato in Kamen Stoyanov’s project, or Vikenti Komitski’s monumentalised recipes - speaks of the social reality that produces them, while discoursing on its refraction into the conventional and synthetic language of art.

The still life thus deconstructed resonates with its component artworks, which are themselves based on, or riff on the material culture of a posited social status, driven by a desire to overachieve through easily accessible substitutes.

From such a sense of desired lifestyle spring Martina Vacheva’s comic compositions and Dimitar Shopov’s digital drawings. The ever-present vacillation between luxury and universal accessibility informs Rada Bukova’s objects, while Alexander Alexandrov’s wallpaper silently narrates uncomfortable domestic secrets. Stanimir Genov’s paintings release impulses, eruptions and precipitations of painting stains, reminiscent of an organism’s viscera, wherein can be discerned the stimuli of an exterior world, with an intensity locked within the movement of the brush. Recognisable forms and images remain on the outside of this unfathomable language of colour, which resists societal ultimatums.

Text by Vera Mlechevska. Translation by Iavor Lubomirov.

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About the Curator

Vera Mlechevska graduated from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria and the University of Arts and Design in Konstfack, Stockholm. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Bulgarian Academy of Science. She works as curator and critic, contributing to various internet and paper media, and as guest curator in many institutions such as City gallery - Sofia, CCA Ancient Bath - Plovdiv, Unicredit Studio Programme - Milan, Czech Centre - Prague, Background - Young Artists Programme for Sariev Contemporary Gallery - Plovdiv and many independent projects.