Artefactual Nature

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The tense relationship at the interface between artifacts, the artifactual and that which is given by nature or by the environment, is at the heart of the works of Kalina Dimitrova and Krassimir Terziev – the two artists represented in the exhibition Artefactual Nature.

However, they both approach the concept from very different starting points. Terziev sets out from an established and seemingly constant place – the private space of an apartment, firewood, an urban environment or the planet Earth itself. But these familiarities are disrupted. The walls of the private space and the architecture coordinates are undermined by the digital. The individual is left with nothing but the lookout of an unprotected spaceship in an undefined universe. The firewood retains its external form but loses its calorific value. The routine of everyday life in a city, the Aristotelian efficiency of the outside world, is disrupted and becomes a mystical dysfunctionality. The shadow of a palm tree unexpectedly falls on the planet Earth itself seen from an extraterrestrial viewpoint.

In this instance Terziev’s work relates closely to Dimitrova’s as she is not preoccupied at all with pre-sets, artifact or nature morte. In Phantoms II, she takes left over rhizome, and supplements its lateral shoots and adventitious roots with ones sculpted in acrylic glass. To define these transparent acrylic waves as a “root substitute” would mean to deprive the work of a substantial part of its poetry, emitting frost and fragility at once.

This brittleness and materiality of the acrylic glass reappears elsewhere in the exhibition. And while this is not nature morte, the work is in fact inspired by the vine, drifting poetically into an interplay of human and artificial elegance.

In the work “Bears and other Surfaces” Dimitrova relates closely to Terziev’s work. A small picture in three variations, a bearskin on the wall – does it symbolize the crucified, the forgiving savior, or is it just a decorative foil? Another meeting point of the two artists’ works.