Vasilka Moneva. Painting

Vasilka Moneva 80, exhibition at the Art Gallery – Ruse

April 22 – May 16, 2025

“...Vasilka Moneva was exuberant, impulsive, energetic and always searching. This helped her at the beginning of her career – she had graduated from the National Art School in arrangement and still lacked the necessary self-confidence. I remember her first paintings – interiors and exteriors, cluttered with accessories, screens, wicker chairs, exotic draperies, vases, fruit bowls, ceramic jugs, antique furniture, easels, lots of flowers and bottles with bizarre shapes.”

This is how Aksinia Dzhurova tells us.

When I was young, I entered Vasilka’s studio behind the clock and saw all these things. It was peculiar. Beautiful. Impressive. When I look at the works we have in the collection of the Art Gallery in Ruse today, I am glad that I have entered this studio and that I know Vasilka. She herself resembles her paintings – with her broad gesture, directness and determination, extreme clarity, unintentionality. Beauty.

Her typical stylization somehow leads to a purely physical feeling of serene joy. Vasilka’s paintings in all her periods, materialities and searches bring complete aesthetic satisfaction. The light application of oil paint from the 70s, later the drawing with scraping, the accumulation of material, grisailles, Vasilka’s blue and pink period bring us to the studios in Ruse and Russia, to Paris and Sibiu, through green forests to hot balconies with balustrades. Vasilka masters all tonalities: sometimes her figures are monumental – draped or marble Nereids, sometimes a gentle child’s portrait conquers the foreground of the landscape. Here the pigeons are static on the windowsill, there they fly, sometimes they are locked in an ornate cage. The mirror inevitably reflects this entire world and multiplies it in scale and angle. Vasilka always situates the interior in an exterior. The window often tells of the central garden in Ruse, the theater and the Ruse buildings; but sometimes – of a Russian village. The volumes of the fruits and the fireworks of the flowers are sometimes geometrically clear, sometimes so richly composed that they exclude all other elements of the interior from the picture. Vasilka paints compositions with not one, not two bouquets, but with four, five, with vessels arranged in almost the same plan, such as I have only seen in Giorgio Morandi. This is especially true of Vasilka's works on burlap with a light painterly brushstroke, hinting at a drawing.

Together with Roxandra Kostova and later Violeta Radkova, Vasilka Moneva is the grande dame of this very likeable and eclectic group of artists, the authors of the Ruse School of Painting, for whom painting is a full-fledged way of life.

Eslitsa Popova

Ruse, April 10, 2025