Category: Paintings

Lamia
2025, acrylic on canvas, 50x50cm.
L’Union de Paris Art Gallery Collection

Photo: Svetlana Hristova

In Greek mythology, Lamia was a beautiful Libyan queen loved by Zeus, punished by Hera, and transformed into a horrifying monster, cursed with eternal grief and madness. 
Patriarchal societies  invented the “female monster” to keep desire in check, to make women terrified of their own appetites. Here, the so-called monstrosity is  a mirror of the male panic — the fear of women who demand, who bite, who speak, who can’t be controlled. But the real violence lies in the cultural apparatus that polices women’s mouths, desires, bodies and voices. 

Something is rotten in Heaven
2019, +359 Gallery, Sofia

Last year, it became something usual to hear about murders or violence against women. The subject has become particularly media-intensive and politically loaded with the passions around the Istanbul Convention. Between the apathy, speculation, anger, horror, and the new, yet conservative wave of protection of family values, the door to the real debate has gradually begun to open – why is this happening and how do we react as a society – as citizens, but also as human beings.
The exhibition of Iskra Blagoeva tries to open this particular door, shocking us a bit, worrying us and most of all confusing the stereotypes, with which we imperceptibly and inevitably live. For one year, the artist has been exploring the topic of the woman – murderer, looking for anchor points in psychology, mythology, poetry and religion. Documentary stories, part of the information flow, real life news give grounds for this, and the references made by the artist go far beyond. Guiding the audience through the themes of vanity and obsession with the new narcissistic culture, crime and sin, holiness, degradation and lack of remedy, confession and forgiveness, the author creates an overall installation in the space where the works complement and build on each other and “tell” about the contents of the exhibition along the vertical of the very Water Tower.
At the heart of the project stands the woman, but this exhibition is not only about women, insofar as the issue of violence therein is addressed as an act of treacherous superiority of the stronger over the weaker. Contrary to the expectations that human problems are discussed through the male image, Iskra Blagoeva has chosen to show the audience not the god-like Adam, but the sinful Eve. Are women-murderers abusers or victims; are they different from men in their role as oppressors and where to draw the line between strength and weakness, between fall and retribution? The two portraits in the exhibition relate to real women who killed in a cruel way their male partners. The artist creates images that are devoid of sentimentality or drama, who seduce with their fragility but also chill with their indifferent alienation and their pale stone faces. By putting haloes above their heads, the author provokes the audience, testing the limits of what we perceive as normal. At the same time, however, she makes a comment on the devoid of substance religiousness, which has become conservative scholasticism, insensitive to the contradictions of human life.
Without expressly highlighting that she engages in the situation in Bulgaria, Iskra Blagoeva’s exhibition comments on many of the current problems in our country, from the murders (of women) through the growing alienation and violence among people, to the devaluation of values, the lack of adequate institutions, the degradation of faith and the chaos in the orientations for the world. This is an exhibition that uses the scandalous and even the horrible to turn to the forgotten role of art to talk about human choice, ethics, saints, and sinners.
The visiting project – the film “Five Years and Five Months” by the directors Andrey Getov and Neda Sokolovska – further underlines the timeliness and the specificity of the problems that motivate the very exhibition, by telling about the problems of the women’s prison in Sliven and the degrading treatment of the women there.

Vladiya Mihaylova, Curator

“I want to know what love is, I want you to show me“
2019, 13×5 cm, object, silver, zirconium and rhodium finish
Sofia City Art Gallery Collection, Bulgaria
MOCAK Krakow Collection, Poland

“Five Years and Five Months”
Movie by Andrey Getov and Neda Sokolovska

Is it still Life? Diplom work 2007

Portrait of nature, commonly referred to as ‘still life’, has certain double meaning: dead nature, nature morte, or still life. This double meaning poses questions about the essence of nature and art, even if we do not have clear answers. Occasionally considered an old-fashioned genre, the representation of dying nature, it is back in vogue and perfectly embodies the spirit of our times.
Still life.
Is this still life?
In the early Renaissance the artists have depicted nature as a shapeless spiritual entity. Nowadays the scientific strive towards artificial life forms, the computerised virtual reality and the focus on vision instead on content perhaps renders traditional search for truth obsolete. There is no absolute reality anymore but multiple realities, each one as real or as artificial as the other ones. It is possible that the end of modernity coincides not only with the end of nature but also with the end of truth. Slowly and steadily, we replace nature, as currently known to us, with a kind of artificial nature. A new model of reality replaces our traditional perception of laws of nature. For most, a trip through the Disneyland jungle in fact is more real than a real one in the Amazonian rainforest. By common opinion, the artificially coloured and genetically modified strawberries are much more beautiful and tastier than the naturally grown ones.

In memory of Miroslav Ničić

Stilllife Series

Medusa needs a haircut
2015, acrylic on canvas, 120×80 cm, private collection

Black paintings of cheerful events

Cerberus Whines in Hell
2015, acrylic on canvas, 90x90cm.
Sofia City Art Gallery Collection, Bulgaria

photo: Kalin Serapionov

Harpalyce Suddenly Got an Appetite Herself
2015, acrylic on canvas, 2 parts painting (main part – 90×90cm, second part – 30x30cm).
private collection

photo: Kalin Serapionov

Harpalyce was the daughter of king Clymenus who was overcome with passion for his daughter. In one version he raped her and she became pregnant. When the son was born she served him up as a meal to his father, who killed her over that. In an alternative version, she was instead transformed into a bird.
The painting depicts Harpalyce as contemporary woman, who just performed an act of consumption.

The Last Suffer
2017, acrylic on canvas, 180x90cm.
Sofia City Art Gallery Collection, Bulgaria

photo: Kalin Serapionov

The painting uses the composition of the “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci, substituting the male figures with all women personages. At the center is the figure of the artist, who is vomiting as if being discussed and fed up with the whole situation. In the work I use the classical composition, which I consider to be a manifestation of the dominant culture and structure of the world, created and performed by men. By bringing different women figures, among them Lilith, myself, women of different colors, who are individual but also strangely similar to each other, I aim to invalidate and transform the dominant pattern of representation. The “ritual” is just a form, with no visible meaning and visibly absent enthusiasm. The predominant feeling is the one of total boredom and ignorance in front of the pathetic of the actually male narrative.

Covering Your Genitals with Leaves is not Enough
2019, acrylic on canvas, 30х30сm.
Sofia City Art Gallery Collection, Bulgaria

photo: Kalin Serapionov

Lilith and Eve Gamble over Adam
2020, acrylic on canvas, 120x120cm.
private collection

photo: Kalin Serapionov

With the painting Lilith and Eve Gamble over Adam, Iskra Blagoeva continues to develop her series of works Black Paintings of Cheerful Events. All of them are related with the mythological narratives or popular (sacral) images which the artist transforms, always depicting a certain extreme states. Going back to the original biblical story of Adam and Eve, the artist chose to present a situation that is seemingly beyond the Fall. We see a time and a space which is not only far from Eden, but seems to fit in another dimension – a black hole in which the matter gains a different shape and character. The heavenly is cultivated, multiplied, depreciated and finally cold-bloodedly consumed. The opened fast food boxes, the flower in an undersized pot, the ash tray, the perfect donut that rather seems a piece of porcelainware – an artefact that has long lost its function to give pleasure, the wine and the bleached skull make up a still life beyond the natural. In this psychedelic world, the light bulb hanging like gallows replaces the sun; there is neither a way out, nor divine light. The consumed Heaven is the decor of the main act, in which the first human, the man – Adam – is gambled over at cards by the lookalikes Lilith and Eve, in whose form the artist portrays herself. The ultimate state of decadence is reached, which cannot “bear” fruit and “resurrect” the natural. In Iskra Blagoeva’s works, this state of overwhelming finale is a metaphor for the failure of the patriarchal order and the societal conditions and structures created by it, which comprise the foundation of the Western Christian culture. Through the extreme denial – the disgust, cruelty, coldness, and arrogant cynicism towards the sacral, the artist seeks a new image, a new beginning, which puts the woman in another role and gives her the strength to be capable not only of creation, but also of destruction like a vengeful Goddess.

Vladiya Mihaylova, curator

Saint 01
2019, acrylic on canvas, 116x81cm.
private collection

Part of the project:
SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN HEAVEN

The Sofia Police Department receives a signal that a human arm placed in a yellow plastic “BILLA” bag was found in a trash bin. In another container, а severed male head was also found inside a plastic bag labeled “Europe Shops.” Later, following a signal from a  communal building, a human male corpse was found, missing it’s limbs, head and genitals.
The police investigation discovered that the murdered K.L. has been missing for several days. He has been living with G.R. and was a step father to A.V. – G.R.’s daughter.
When investigating A.B.’s room, the police found a jar with a male penis and testicles in it, filled with red-coloured fluid.
A.V. confessed that  she has been sexually abused by her stepfather when she was 6 years old. This went on for three years and she did not share it with anybody and that was the motif for the murder.
Sometime ago she asked him if he remembered what he had done to her as a child. He told her that he didn’t. And if so, he was forced to do it by the Satan; therefore, he would not apologize. After a while, she invited him to her room and strangled him with a nunchaku and dissected the corpse.

photo: Gergana Mihova

Saint 02
2019, acrylic on canvas, 80x60cm.
private collection

For many years M.R. was abused by her son who wos an alcoholic. One day while he was sleeping she killed him with a hoe. She went to prison, but after a year she was released for being seriously ill. She lived with her husband, who was also ill, with whom she had a bad relationship.Later she decided to kill him. She went to his bed and made a small incision in the carotid artery with a butter knife, than locked the door and left him bleeding to death.

photo: Gergana Mihova

Unfinished business with Oedipus
2020, acrylic on canvas, two pieces each 30x30cm.
private collection

Adam Was Queer
2024, mixed media, 120х180cm.
private collection

With her latest painting, Iskra Blagoeva continues a well-established trend in her work – the artistic and critically motivated reconsideration of myths, symbols and narratives fundamental to human culture and related to the concepts of gender identity and self-perception, the power of representations and resulting stereotypes, as well as the personal act of revolt as a creative stimulus for emancipation.

The artwork is propelled as an experimental reading of the biblical cosmogonic myth about the creation of the world. The first human being, Adam, is transformed into a strange, ambiguous, androgynous creature – with his stolid, passionless, gentle and beautiful face, as if hooded by the impenetrable nimbus of his long black hair, and his whole figure resembling a finely and delicately painted porcelain piece, he emerges as an enigmatic image in which the masculine and the feminine alike challenge the mythological seal of identity. God creates Adam in his own image and likeness, but his creation is presented as initially split in the neutral and empty space of non-coincidence – an iconoclastic as well as a philosophically relevant gesture of revolt against the idea of divine predestination, according to which the pure and perfectly preordained act (actus purus) of God the Creator is absolutely identical to his essence. Introducing difference into the prototype before the appearance of any real distinction, before the appearance of Eve as the other of Adam, is a paradox to the very constitutive gesture of the Creator and a rupture in the foundational myth of creation. This new phantasmal image of the biblical proto-man introduces fluidity between his potential forms, which starkly contradicts the distinctive dissociation from the will of his creator – it expresses the possible rejection of self-definition, that is, of reducing the variety of possibilities to only one clearly delineated role which would inevitably embody the lack of choice and the super-actual power of the prototype. With the imaginary opening of this gap where the supreme archetype dissolves into uncertainty and irreducible difference, Adam is presented in his heterogeneous mode as a queer being: having attained the apple of knowledge before the appearance of Eve, he is the bearer of a different truth – that of non-definition, of the unspecified role, of transidentity, illustrated by a singular and fascinating image of hesitation and melancholic grandeur that both anticipates and exceeds the narrative about the origin of the human race.

With her present artwork, Iskra Blagoeva ironically suggests that the universality of gender identity or any other form of identity determination is not something primordial and does not consist in some natural or transhistorical circumstance – it must be worked out through the knowledge of the multiplicity of the human being, through the difference which initially scatters us among contradictory impulses, states and choices, in other words, through the experience of nonidentity. The image of Adam, who is not image and likeness of his creator, is the image of an alternative – of disobedience and resistance to a predetermined functional order, modelling the world according to some rigid mythological axiom that points to us and declares “you are who you are”.

Philip Stoilov

Life is not a stilllife

At first glance, Iskra Blagoeva’s current exhibition appears organized around six works unified by a common motif – a dead bird (or parts of a dead bird), situated in a coldly composed interior. Yet, the gallery space itself is significantly transformed.

The works are concentrated in one room, leaving another entirely empty. The chosen gallery room is painted dark, echoing the interiors depicted in the works, while the space is filled with house plants, evoking the sense of a garden. All of this invites deep reflection on the place of humans within nature, the place of nature within the human world, and whether there is an equality between humans and nature, or between a man-made garden and the wild. Iskra’s paintings feel like illusionistic breaks in the wall, recalling the most ancient forms of still life. Yet every element in them is carefully selected and composed. The precisely placed dead bird is an unexpectedly artistic decision. On one hand, it appears completely natural within the minimalistic interior; on the other hand, it feels like an unexpected creature, dead in the most unexpected place.

The bird, symbolizing flight – and thus freedom – and associated with open space, here is delicately dead within the human habitat, with no sign of injury or pain. In their distinctly dark color palettes, within which the bird stands out as a light spot, these works express the sinister reality of our time, where humans constantly attempt to subdue nature, to bring it into their homes, to tame it, or, most perversely, to create it themselves.

The coldly measured drawing recalls the classical wing of German Neue Sachlichkeit, reinforced by the carefully arranged compositions that, at first glance, seem accidental but are in fact meticulously thought out by the artist – what to include, how to depict it. The segregated gallery space feels like a temple, accessible through an antechamber, with spaces sectioned off by curtains – a temple of dead nature (nature morte), ironically highlighting humanity’s helplessness in its attempt to subdue nature, to fit the uncontainable into its own world.

Lyuben Domozetski

Little Bird Place, exhibition view:

photos: Little Bird Place