Pravdoliub Ivanov

About Pravdoliub Ivanov

Born in 1964 in the socialist People's Republic of Bulgaria, Pravdoliub Ivanov was trained in the traditional discipline of painting in the National Art Academy in Sofia graduating in the early 1990ies. However, he disposed of the means usual for a painter quite rapidly as if agreeing with Damien Hirst that if painting is anyways dealing with the adaptation of already existing objects, then the artist is better off dealing directly with them.

Thus the 'characters' in the installations, the objects, the drawings, and the photographs of Pravdoliub Ivanov are most often the very ordinary objects that are with us daily or the typical situations where everyone can recognize his or herself. The interest of the artist for the easy to find and atypical for art materials and/or found objects, at the expense of paint and brush, is probably due to the reaction to his conservative education as well as to his attentive curiosity for the surrounding world where the man-made may possess more then just use value.

The famous sentence of Comte de Lautréamont – "Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table", seems to apply to the works of Pravdoliub Ivanov as well. That’s mainly because of the fact that the 'encounters' engineered by the artist in his works are always fun to follow. He is revealing his attention to the 'hidden life of things', his sensibility in utilizing the potential of these things by bringing it out into the open through rearrangement of details and different reassembling of their composite elements.

The artist manages to de-contextualize their usual existence while constructing a different set of circumstances that are reinforcing the links to the viewer.