“Little Bird Place” Gallery presents an exhibition of the latest painting experiments of Kaliya Kalacheva. Well known for her work with the urban environment and its strict constructions, in recent years the artist has become increasingly tempted by the transition to the natural and the multi-layered dimensions of the landscape. Kaliya suggests a different idea for landscape. It raises the question of the need to “change the landscape” – one of the oldest genres in art, which requires constant updating to be able to keep up with the present.
Through non-traditional techniques and materials, natural and non-natural colors and “pieces” a changed nature appears to us – unknown and tempting, radiant, shiny and flickering… Kaliya Kalacheva challenges us to question the obvious and look more closely and deeply in the abstractness of raster formations – a work of intuitive chance. An experience reminiscent of a journey with ever-changing landscapes, scenes, fast-paced sections of natural scenery, sometimes with inhabited or abandoned “human” structures and buildings.
Our own reflection is also present in the works – in the glimmer of the gold and silver sheets or in the small human figures, recreating a sense of vagueness with an impetus to the question – whether we will be pawns or main characters “in the landscape”. The exhibition also comments on the ambiguity in the modern urban man’s notion of idyllic natural beauty – a notion that is often intervened by unnatural expectations of order, brightness, compatibility with the city and its screams. That is why in some of the works we can feel the deliberate kitsch and splendor inherent in this artificial, “decorated” and threatening idyll…
“Change the scenery!” is an exhibition-appeal, commentary, criticism and friendly wink, experiment and provocation to our senses for real and artificial, stereotypical and up-to-date, comfort and improvisation.
Curators: Teodora Konstantinova and Radoslav Mehandzhiyski (Art & Culture Today)
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