FIGURATIVELY

29 May - 17 June 2023

The fourth exhibition by Vesselin Nachev at Stubel Gallery is not just an extension of the previous three. It is not even necessarily the natural next step in his artistic chronology. As abreather, as an offbeat between the usual rhythm, this somewhat sleepy collection of naked bodies is probably trying to stop time for its author and for his real or imagined models. There is something unrevealable, something mystical, even gothic in this exhibition. Youth and beauty are the first divine gifts with which everyone parts; they quickly fly away, sinking into the twilight depths of memories, turned into still-frames of the things of life. Vesselin Nachev plays with the category of inevitability, turning it into an autonomous element of his aesthetics and his plastic metaphors. Moreover, he weaves it into the deconstructing method of his painting, which remains the most recognizable marker of his art of the last two decades. The figuration of the physical body in his paintings is conditional, the presence is rather imaginary, the figures are much more a vision than a given. The subjects of those paintings do not ask and do not answer, explain nor teach. They simply are. They stay the same. Unlike everything else.

Philip Zidarov

Vesselin Nachev was born in 1958 in Burgas, but he lives and works in Varna. He graduated in painting from the National Academy of Arts in 1985.

The artist has had more than 30 solo exhibitions in Bulgaria, Germany, Switzerland, and Russia, among them National Autumn Exhibitions in Plovdiv (2006 and 2020), in Sofia art galleries Art 36 and Stubel, Varna galleries – Gallery 8, A&G Artmeeting, Varna City Art Gallery, Museum – Gallery Georgi Velchev, and Blankenese Gallery, Hamburg.

Vesselin Nachev has also participated in many group exhibitions: “The Dispute about Reality” – curator Stanislav Pamukchiev (Shipka 6 Gallery), “Social Scales” – curator Ilian Lalev (City Art Gallery, Veliko Tarnovo), and“Air” – a curatorial project of Andrei Daniel (Shipka 6 Gallery).

The artist has received numerous awards like The Grand Prize for painting of Allianz Bulgaria (2016) and the National award Zahari Zograf (2019).

The curator of the exhibition is Philip Zidarov.