ANETA DRAGUSHANU
painting and drawing
30.10-2.11.2023
Aneta Dragushanu devotes her whole life and all her emotions to art, it is the main content of everyday life, which circulates around the moments in the studio. Thanks to this, her presence is inseparable from the history of Bulgarian painting from the second half of the 20th century. She shares this dedication with her husband, Georgi Petrov – the two live together in continuous communication with the painterly matter. In recent years, and especially after the big retrospective exhibition at the Union of Bulgarian Artists in 2017, the artist is a kind of sensation and discovery for collectors and gallerists, and this increased interest in a sense disturbs the calm creative oasis. However, what is amazing about her art remains this process of purifying and distilling the most essential into a personal, motivated and protected image system, and this process she has not abandoned to this day. As a persistently repeated experiment, each work testifies to a deep and sincere intention, outliving the specific circumstances of the artistic activity, the adversities or the organizational structures accompanying the complex creative path of most Bulgarian artists of the period.
Galina Dekova, 2023
The autonomous pictorial world and plastic discoveries of Aneta Dragushanu determine her significant presence in the new Bulgarian painting, determine her active participation in development processes and realization of a strong wave of modernization in art from the 70s, 80s, 90s, in the dynamic processes of assimilation of language forms from modern art and their integration into the layers of cultural tradition. Aneta Dragushanu’s work preserves an archetypal and spiritual memory, a warm secret connection with the long pre-modern culture. In her art comes alive an impulse for reactivation, a new awareness of the deep connection with the Great Mythological Time and with the memory of the ancestors. Bonding with contents, which on our lands still warm with their primary power and energy, we still realize as something of our own, which basically defines us, which we know as a birthmark of mental, spiritual and cultural belonging. In her mature and late period, Aneta Dragushanu takes this position to the end, jealously defending it as something stable, deeply essential, immanent inherent, which will preserve us for a long time. It will protect us in the accelerations of today’s hyper-technological and information-jammed world with its illusory, altered idea of success and happiness.
Stanislav Pamukchiev, 2023