Curator: Teodora Konstantinova
15.12.2023 – 14.01.2024
Little Bird Place gallery
1000 Sofia, 7 „11-ti Avgust“ Str.
Opening: 15.12.2023 (Friday) – 5:00 – 9:00 pm
See all works from the exhibition HERE!
Presentation of the exhibition by the artist and the curator – 7:00 pm
Kaliya Kalacheva’s exhibition “Mixed Reality” continues her line of research and challenging the concept of landscape – as a visual experience and as a genre in painting. Continuous excitement for the artist is the rhythm of the present day with the needs of ever more vivid haste, feverishness, gluttony, overconsumption of experiences and products, the desire of today’s society for things to happen here and now, all at once. Past, present and future intersect, collide, heat up. It is as if the slow and meaningful living, contemplation and immediacy have evaporated. We live between the real and the virtual, and the lines of intersection are increasingly thin. The current exhibition with abstract painting discusses precisely the problems of the hypertime in a state of “mixed reality”.
Kaliya Kalacheva steps on this environment characteristic of our time and embarks on dynamic painting experiments with the aesthetic impact. Each painting is intersected by lines creating a sense of layered reality/s. As artificial intelligence enters art, the question of “how” is a work created emerges extensively – does it involve virtual, augmented reality, or is this mixed reality entirely the work of the artist’s imagination and hand? Kaliya Kalacheva’s abstract landscapes oscillate between the real and the imaginary, resemble something, but also nothing concrete. Altered and strengthened, they deceive but also lead, ask riddles and seek answers.
Teodora Konstantinova
Kaliya Kalacheva was born in 1986 in Sofia. She graduated with a master’s degree in painting from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia in 2011. In the year of her graduation, she was awarded the Edmond Demirdjian Foundation “Young Painter with Promising Development” Award. In 2014, she won a place in the prestigious Cité des Arts residency program in Paris, France. In 2016, she was included in another artistresidency – Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. In 2017, she received special recognition at the Women in Art Competition, Orlando, Florida. 2020 brings her the SBH award for young artist at the Biennale for contemporary art “Friends of the Sea” in Bourgas. In 2021, participants in the “National Painting and Sculpture Competition” chose her as the winner in the painting category. In 2022, she won an award for Painting during the exhibition “Biographical: Places of Experience”. Paintings by Kaliya Kalacheva are part of the collections of the Ugo Wooten Art Center in Belgium, Imago Mundi – Luciano Benetton collection, Italy, National Art Gallery in Sofia, Sofia City Art Gallery, private collections in Bulgaria, Great Britain, USA, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, Serbia and others. Kaliya has over 20 solo exhibitions and participation in over 100 general national and international exhibitions.
Selected solo exhibitions:
2023 “Weightlessness” Rakursi gallery, Sofia
2022 “Bio Center”, Little Bird Place, Sofia
2021 “Zen/Kitsch”, Credo Box part of Credo Bonum gallery, Sofia
2020 “Change the Landscape!” Little Bird Place gallery, Sofia
2020 “Imaginary Constructions” Rakursi gallery, Sofia, 2018 “Light” A+ gallery, Sofia
2017 “Air on wood” Nuance gallery, Sofia,
2017 “Tandem” [a]cube Contemporary, Sofia
2016 “Pieces” Yuzina Gallery, Sofia
2015 “Close/Open” Perspectives gallery, Sofia
2013 “Where are you going?” gallery for Modern Art, Sofia
2012 “Wait!”, Rakursi Gallery, Sofia
The project was implemented with the financial support of the National Fund “Culture” under the program “One-year grant – 2022”.
