Artist Statement
I am a Bulgarian painter and mother living and working in Los Angeles. I construct large scale spatially and texturally dense paintings, sculptures and installations, at a midpoint between abstraction and figuration. The body is my subject and materiality my medium as I explore perception and the limits of painting through line, color, and collage. My paintings are about everything as filtered through memory and emotional and visual sensitivity framed by my philosophical training in phenomenology and critical theory.
The paintings I submitted are all from the last two years and part of the Pompeii Gray body of work. In late December 2020 and during the lockdown I was working on large scale tapestry paintings that covered every inch of floor and wall space in my studio. I had been working off the stretcher for two years. I was suddenly possessed by the desire to pull out the largest colorful abstract painting I had in the rack and proceeded to feverishly cover the entire surface with white gesso. As soon as I was finished, I started painting with a thin translucent gray leaving the surface feeling dry and parched like a rock face. The figures emerged from the terrain as though they were fragments already present in the debris inside a sieve being shaken by the hands of an archeologist. The first painting was the massive work called "And she cried for the weekend".
