OLGA VALNAROVA, painting 18.11-02.12.2025

OLGA VALNAROVA /1914-2012/

Late Autumn

Paintings

November 18-December 2, 2025

With this exhibition, Arte Gallery marks, albeit with some delay, the 110th anniversary of the birth of Olga Velnarova (1914-2012). Her name ranks among the most significant and prominent Bulgarian artists of the past century. Her art is marked by exquisite plastic artistry and is filled with natural inner freedom and refined pictorial taste.

The artist graduated from the Academy of Arts under Prof. Dechko Uzunov, but her time in Paris, spent in the studio of André Lhote (1941), was particularly important for her creative development. The distinctive “symbiosis” between the two lines of professional development is particularly evident in several oil paintings. Each in its own way, they express a dilemma that was almost fateful for Bulgarian painting in the 20th century – the dialectic of attraction/repulsion between our own and the foreign, between native traditions and modern European art.

What is more, Olga Valnarova achieves an organic alloy between, on the one hand, the centuries-old achievements of European tonal painting, enriched by the experience of post-impressionism, fauvism, and abstractionism, and, on the other hand, the expressive trends in our painting from the 1930s and 1940s. She consistently deepens the artistic subject matter with subtle personal emotional intonations.

The exhibition also includes several watercolours created during her last stay in Paris (1993), in which the artist logically arrives at an abstract-figurative synthesis, seeking the impact of the plastic image through certain tonal comparisons and architectonic structures. The leading element is poetic invention, which saturates the image with rich associations and fills it with elements and connotations that go beyond conventional narrative or thematic definitions.

As a rule, the main motifs in her paintings – natural, object-related or connected with the poetic transformation of certain substances (air, water, light, earth) – are simplified and occupy the central areas of the pictorial field. Instead, Olga Valnarova saturates and develops the problems of colour and texture in such a way that, when perceiving the works, we have the sensation of an image in which there is a living, pulsating, colourful matter in space that has overcome the external limitations of weight and form.

In this way, the visual image ” eludes” a specific genre or style definition, directing its energy towards achieving a comprehensive pictorial synthesis with colour and texture playing a leading role.

Prof. Chavdar Popov, PhD in Fine Arts