STANISLAV PAMUKCHIEV, painting 20.10.-01.11.2025

STANISLAV PAMUKCHIEV

SELF-PORTRAIT

painting

20.10.-01.11.2025

The newly created series of self-portraits, 2025, is the result of a working introduction to a mode of human and artistic self-revelation, of self-knowledge in the tensions of the Great Existential Questions. The self-portraits are an emotional baring, finding a place on the familiar face. A meeting place of the physical, the mortal, the banal, the describable, the vainly tempted with the secret of the emotional and mental content of the Self.

The self-portraits are sensitively imagined, overcoming physical characteristics and insisting on a manifestation in an expressive, psychic plastic form, a spontaneous gesture of emotional and spiritual openness.

The large canvases in the exhibition are single-figure compositions – portraits that thematise the artist, looking into his strange fate – possessed and doomed, victorious and defeated in the battle to achieve a visual form, a plastic flesh that carries the contents of the essential, the sacred, the personal.

These new paintings are an encounter with one’s own dignity and misfortune, strength and impotence, dark premonition and spiritual enlightenment. They are an encounter with one’s own anxiety, with the unease of the times in which we live. Paintings, laid bare like an intimate act and a shared plastic experience, in which the silhouettes of the great masters—teachers, with their understood and misunderstood lessons—emerge. They come – Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Courbet and Daumier, Van Gogh and Soutine, Käthe Kollwitz, Cornelio Baba, Frank Auerbach and more… with their insurmountable artistic measure and majestic spirit.

Self-portraits – breathed into life.

The exhibition at the ARTE Gallery, as a prehistory of the author’s choice of psychological portraiture, will include two very early self-portraits, from 1979 and 1984.

Stanislav Pamukchiev, Sept. 2025