Dimitar Genchev

In his life-size paintings, Dimitar Genchev (b. 1985, BG) alternates between different textures and intensities of materials such as oil paint and epoxy resins. As a virtuously skilled figurative painter, Genchev transforms the flat surface of his paintings into almost tangible, three-dimensional environments that are as wondrous as they are a testimony to the artist's abilities with his medium. He has a strong personal connection with the banal and intimate scenes in our everyday life and their hidden and hard to find beauty. This mundane subject matter is converted into uncanny and sometimes surrealistic scenes by the use of contrasting styles and techniques that appear alien to its surroundings. By changing rhythms in color, texture, structure and subject matter Genchev converts the ordinary into the extraordinary. 

Painting what he observes around him, sometimes extended with motifs he finds online, Genchev invites the viewer into his life in post-Communist Bulgaria. Genchev notes that ''if you observe things for a long time, you start to love them.'' So lovingly he captures how light touches the surfaces and structures of life, from sunlit rooms with outdated furniture, to soft skinned bodies, glazed ceramics and rusty iron or peeling walls. The paintings reveal a beautiful but strange atmosphere where figures and objects mysteriously appear from abstract clouds. Genchev visually narrates an open story and the viewer's imagination has the freedom and space to complete it. 

Genchev depicts the world around him, but never simply copies it. Striving to renew the tradition of painting, he has been experimenting for over a decade with different paints and ways of depicting reality. Hyper realistic elements emerge from abstract painted surfaces. Sometimes aided by the computer, he fuses strange motifs into hybrid, dreamlike sceneries, or he combines different viewpoints, zooming in and out as if moving around while painting. This results in a truly cinematic effect. Triggering our perception, he creates a mysterious world in which nothing is what it seems. 

Genchev lives and works in Bulgaria and Amsterdam. He studied at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, BG, and the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.