Nina Pancheva-Kirkova graduated from Specialized High School for Fine Arts Lavrenov, Plovdiv. She obtained her BA in painting at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts. Her MA of Fine Art she received at University of Southampton in 2011. In 2015 she completed her PhD at the same university. Her practice-based research investigated at painting in post-communist Bulgaria and its relationship to Socialist Realism.
Among the prizes that her works have received are: first place prize for painting in the competition of Foundation “Anastas Staykov” and National Endowment Fund “13 Centuries Bulgaria”; shortlisted for the final exhibition of Beep International Painting Prize, Swansea, Wales, etc. Shortlisted as one of the artists to present Bulgaria in the Henkel and KulturKontakt competition in Vienna, Austria. Co-organizer of series of seminars as part of the collaborative project Looking at Images between University of Southampton and Goldsmiths University, London.
Nina Pancheva-Kirkova lives and works in London, UK.
My works are not an attempt for self-expression. They are result of the idea of fine art as a method for exploring the world. In this sense they could be described as "moving away from the personality of the artist" in search of images and visual language, often between the abstract and the figurative, to take the viewer into different realities. I often work with images taken from photographs. Once transformed into paintings, they lose their claim for objectivity and start living as images that ask questions about reality and "realism”-s.
In the context of these endeavours arose my interest in the subject of utopia as an ideal world that even though (or perhaps precisely because) it is not feasible in its original idealistic vision provides images that could change or at least compound the perception of our imperfect world. In the current exhibition I present images from a fictitious museum of a utopian future. They depict a Bulgarian town built entirely by private donations – churches, hospitals, universities, schools... Here utopia interweaves with reality, as the depicted buildings were constructed during and after our Renaissance as the result of impressive in scale charity activities.
