The exhibition is held in partnership with the Boris Georgiev Art Gallery — Varna, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture.
Colour is the great force playing the central role in Katrin Tomova’s painting. I can say with confidence that she is among the finest colourists in contemporary Bulgarian art, and I might name a dozen or so of them: Emil Stoychev, Milko Bozhkov, Andrey Daniel, Svilen Blazhev, Gredi Assa, Vihroni Popnedelev, Atanas Hranov, Dolores Dilova, Veselin Nachev, Lyuben Genov. And, as Kandinsky advised, Katrin Tomova has renounced the realistic, the figurative and the material in her painting, and has given herself over to a powerful and free, abstract-expressionist mode of expression – one that gives colour full scope to project its rich visual life in complex, multicoloured harmonies.
Taming, mastering and aestheticising polychromy has always been a difficult test, one that few painters meet successfully. Katrin Tomova, however, creates magnificent abstract compositions in which, with enviable cultivation and an incomparable sense of painterly tone, she sculpts the pictorial fabric of her imaginative spaces. In places they sound dense, saturated and total, with fiery reds and contrasting dark, deep tones reaching into black. Elsewhere they are light, translucent and joyful, like some paradisal garden. The blues, greens, oranges and yellows are found in delightful tonal relationships, in which the sense of beautiful, expressive music becomes inevitable. I should note that the connection between abstract painting and music is a strong one. And so, throughout the exhibition, one seems to hear the sound of a rich, sometimes dramatic, but always lively and swirling fusion jazz.
Katrin Tomova’s paintings are pervaded by movement; of the abstract spaces, of the colour zones, of the painterly patches and brushstrokes, of the contrasts, of the sharp and rounded forms, of the bright, dense centres and the dark, mysterious peripheries. This plastic movement in her painting leads naturally to the strong artistic feeling with which it is made. The painterly gesture is powerful and maximally free, yet at the same time cultivated and aestheticised. It betrays the temperament and sensuousness of the creative experience, but also the refined taste that subordinates everything to a complex visual, intellectual and spiritual harmony.
Katrin Tomova’s canvases impose yet another indisputable conclusion – she loves the large scale of the pictorial field, or, put metaphorically, ‘the great arena of painting’. It is astonishing how a lady such as Katrin can handle, master flawlessly and transform such large formats into highly aesthetic works of contemporary painting. This demands serious and exceptionally professional creative qualities.
So, I have briefly indicated six stylistic and plastic qualities in Katrin Tomova’s painting that are easily recognised and exert a powerful effect throughout the present exhibition, namely — colour, music, movement, feeling, gesture and scale. There are, of course, many other and highly interesting aspects, but these belong to a more complex philosophical, intellectual and metaphysical context. They concern the symbolic and spiritual meanings that can be found and read in her compositions; the ethical clashes and collisions within a universal, cosmic dimension; the drama of human and even divine relations; the psycho-emotional outbursts within a sensitive spiritual nature; a more elevated and enigmatic existence. And further – the radiant light, the multicoloured beauty, the sparkling joy, the poetic journey and the redemptive love in the human world. Katrin Tomova grants us the happy chance to seek out all this, and much more, in her rich, wonderful and stirring painting.
This exhibition is part of Art Gallery Kazanlak’s project Applied, Fine, Contemporary — a cycle of three exhibitions, contract with the Ministry of Culture: РД 11-06-29/01.04.2026.
General media partner: Bulgarian National Radio.
