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Nina Pancheva is a visual artist exhibiting at the ROI for the first time this year.

'The painting ‘Realities’ began with finding a label—a label whose ingredients barely resemble food. This discovery provoked a series of questions, mainly about the tension between bread as both a symbol and a word, as well as between words and the meanings they convey. 

When, in fact, does bread stop being bread? When do we stop perceiving it as bread? And why do we continue to see it as bread if its substance no longer aligns with that of real one?

In my home country, Bulgaria, we have a saying: “No one is bigger than bread.” In the past, keeping bread at home and giving away the last pieces to birds were important parts of our culture. In respect for this tradition, I’ve chosen a very traditional technique—oil on canvas. Another direction of the creative process unfolded through exploring formal questions about space on the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. These questions arose from the tension between the mimetic look of the figurative elements and the (almost) abstract forms of the label. By adding the label, the surface divides into two levels of perception: one being the realistic depiction of the bread, and the other, the abstract shape of the label.'

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