Sarieva / Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “Voice Lines” by Rudi Ninov within the framework of Art Brussels 2023. This is the first solo participation of the young Bulgarian artist at an international fair.

“Voice Lines” reflects Rudi’s ongoing interest in language and writing as an occasion for pictorial exploration. His most recent works are directly related to the manifestation of sound in drawing, shape and color. Engaging with composition, color and texture, the young artist’s works evoke a variety of associations that can be related to written language, symbols, sounds or musical visualizations. They reveal Rudi’s unfolding relationship to abstraction from two distinct but adjacent perspectives: the formal and the personal. The artist describes “Voice Lines” as the indeterminate space between two ends, which is never fixed, malleable, where marks can emerge and resonate with deeply personal significance without being codified into purely formal language.

Rudi shares that in 2021 he came across works by the visual poet Vesselin Sariev (1951 – 2003) created before and immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s-90s that made him think about “the accumulated sounds which are so inherent to the shape of native letters” and what foreign shapes sound like. During Art Brussels, in newly created works, the artist will present more personal reflections on language, animated cinema and its connection to the art of the poet and writer, linked closely to the mail art-movement, Vesselin Sariev.

The works are presented in an environment curated by Vesselina Sarieva, including the exhibition gesture “The Carpet”, a proposal for a meeting place in each art installation. It is an alternative to the traditional idea of a gallery, museum, art fair, etc. Egalitarian, open and accessible for everyone “The Carpet” invites the audience to sit down right next to each other, universalizing everyone, regardless if they are visitors, artists, curators, collectors, etc. The concept of “The Carpet” is inspired by a metaphor by the artist Luchezar Boyadjiev and developed into an ongoing project by the curator Vesselina Sarieva.

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Rudi Ninov (Teteven, Bulgaria, 1992) lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. He earned a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2015 and a MFA in the class of Monika Baer, Amy Sillman and Nikolas Gambaroff at Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany in 2021.
His recent exhibitions include Writing Paintings, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano (2023); Colour Words in Prologue, Sarieva / Gallery, Plovdiv (2021), Brittle Power, Kunsthal 44Møen, Møn (2021); ORBIT, Messeturm, Frankfurt am Main (2020); Gravity works only when you look down, Vaska Emanuilova Gallery, Sofia (2019); FOTEL, Sotheby’s, Frankfurt am Main (2019).
Rudi is also the recipient of the Linklaters LLP Prize, Germany (2020) and Cultural Perspectives Foundation Scholarship, Bulgaria (2019). His works are part of the Museum Voorlinden, Caldic Collection, Wassenaar, The Netherlands; Fondazione CRC, Cuneo, Italy; Imago Mundi Collection, Treviso, Italy.