Invasion of the Landscape

 Art Gallery Serdica presents Prof. PhD Adelina Popnedeleva with her exhibition of paintings Invasion of the Landscape. The exhibition will take place between October 21 and November 20, 2020 at the art space of the Zhenski Pazar Market.

The artist uses oil, acrylic and watercolor paints on canvas, and in some of the paintings there are collage ready-made objects and embroidery.

“I came across a garden where teddy bears, tigers and monkeys were perched on the branches of trees, under bushes, on the grass. The grandson had grown up, but his grandmother didn’t like to throw away the cute stuffies…”, the author shares and explains that this is the plot of the exhibition, and the theme is innocence. The innocence that children lose when they learn the concepts of “good” and “evil”, “right” and “wrong”, “beautiful” and “ugly”, “aesthetics and kitsch” when they are already in the world of duality.

According to Adelina Popnedeleva, toys are a symbol of childhood, as well as nostalgia for this most innocent period of our lives. Because they are mostly made by adults, they actually show the changing understanding of innocence of already grown children.

“The use of child innocence is a phenomenon that has had its manifestations for a long time, both through images of child heroes who are exploited for ideological purposes and for the launch of super commercial models of behavior, for example by the Walt Disney Company, the creators of Barbie and Ken dolls, the authors of anime-style comics and toys,” said the author and added that while in more romantic times the harsh wildlife was a symbol of the sublime, in the modern civilized world the landscape is more cultural, created by people’s intervention in natural resources.

And yet, according to her, the position continues to be imposed in art that in order to approach the sublime, the works must be dramatic, even tragic, with predominantly gloomy, even threatening and sinister tones, and an aesthetic position related to beauty and joy of life is considered almost commercial.

Prof. PhD Adelina Popnedeleva shares “The invasion of toys of the landscape is an invasion of human ideas of the world created by humans, and the dynamics of the concepts of “good” and “evil” is a resistance to the imposed criteria and perhaps a desire to return to innocence”.

“LIFE IS LIFE IS” Textile Installation specially prepared for the European Night of Museums, Sofia

“LIFE IS LIFE IS” is a Textile Installation of volumetric letters, which are made of multicolored pieces of fabric, sometimes in harmonious, sometimes in disharmonious combinations, just as our life is a series of predictable and unpredictable events.

The words “text” and “textile” have a common root in Latin, i.e. “texere”, which means weave, knit, and Derrida calls the text a “Fabric of Characters.”

And so, you can clearly see the semantic connection that gives great opportunities to textiles as a material and technique in contemporary art.