Zhenya is a multidisciplinary Bulgarian artist, based in London, exploring themes of fluidity, constraint within self-identity and self-expression, the body and the entanglement between power, consumerism, and desire in our time. Influenced by the post-minimalist movement, Eastern European Social Realism art, avant-garde cinema, and current world events, she blends brutalist inspired visuals with personal narratives, often drawing on symbolism of Christianity, Slavic folklore and digital culture.

Her artistic practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture and video. The figures she creates in her recent works are enveloped in a sculptural veil, usually in a shape of a human hand, where the hand plays the role of the main protagonist rather than a passive executer of the intentions of the brain. She is fascinated by the power of the grip – the power of our hands that are the main tool to work, create, explore, or destroy. We touch, squeeze, clutch, hold - this part of our bodies is heavily concentrated with intention, desire to possess, to embrace, to harm, or to caress. In her works this grip is rather abstracted, entwined with the body parts of her subjects, restricting them or providing a kind of protective shelter, a framework for them to coexist, or even to expand their meaning. It is a restrictive space, yet full of potentialities, within which are portrayed her different reflections on the human condition, and more particularly innocence, vulnerability and the intersections with the social and political environment they exist in. Within the fingers’ touchy outlines lay the different dynamics of the everyday flexing of power, it is where narratives, threaded within the themes of influence, hyper-consumerism and commodification unfold. Zhenya is interested in delving into the materiality of touch by building the conflicting layers of the body and mind’s architecture, hoping to expose something relevant, raw and honest.  

She graduated BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London in 2024.

Exhibitions

2024

Graduate Art Exhibition 2024, Candid Gallery, London UK

BA Fine Art Degree Show, Goldsmiths University of London UK

Echoes Into The Future, SafeHouse, London UK

A Daughter and Feral Mothers, AMP Gallery, London UK

2023

Drawing Open 2023, No Format Gallery, London UK