Kalina Dimitrova

Check-In (2) presents works by Kalina Dimitrova, who was born in 1975 in Gabrovo. After graduating from the department of Mural Painting at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, she still lives and works in the Bulgarian capital. The artist’s oeuvre consists of photography, sculpture, objects, and installations. Dimitrova often visualizes existential matters of human civilization through the realistic depiction of everyday objects. While in some series, she critically views them from alternative perspectives, in other work groups, she creates objects that contain the residue of human relations from our near or distant past.

Check-In (2) displays large works from the series Biophilia, in which Dimitrova is questioning the development of human civilization in the face of nature’s overwhelming power. The paintings impressively expose our fragile relation with nature.

In the window of Collect.Gallery, a neon work is outlining the horizon. While illuminating a part of the gallery it also shines bright yellow light onto the outer street for alerting about climate change. The concepts of change and transformation play also important roles in Kalina Dimitrova’s oeuvre. In her installation of water bottles, juice bottles and beer cans made out of plaster at Collect.Gallery, she deals with everyday products of modern civilization, which gain new meaning through the alienation of color and material. Like ghosts of a near past, the garbage of our lifestyle is following us wherever we go just to remind us of the disasters that we permanently cause.

In the end, the photo series of found images entitled “After the flight” presents portraits of the astronauts Yuri Gagarin, Nicole Scott, John Glenn, Valentina Tereshkova, Georgi Ivanov, and Claude Enior. Besides these astronauts who have been on real space missions, the series also contains screenshots of astronauts from some iconic Sci-Fi movies like Blake’s Seven, Star Wars, 2001: Space Odyssey, or Solaris. So, Dimitrova’s series merges fiction with reality for interrelating ideas that we have about the universe with its a priory reality.