This is Houben R.T.

Houben Tcherkelov, (Bulgarian: Хубен Черкелов; known as Houben R.T.; American, born in Bulgaria upon January 23, 1970) is a painter and experimental performer who lives and works in New York. In his to come photographs, film, and installations post-communist Bulgaria and Bulgarian art is a recurrent theme. In his more recent work, Tcherkelov paints images from American and other national currencies using impasto, glaze, foil, acrylic and watercolor techniques. In everything of his produce an effect the artist seeks to suggest the way in which figurative images legitimize national power.

Houben Tcherkelov was born upon January 23, 1970, in Kardzhali, a town in southeastern Bulgaria. Tcherkelov studied painting at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, and was joined with the innovative movement re the XXL Gallery.

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Tcherkelov’s beforehand works in Sofia analyze announce and excitement structures in a bureau transitioning at similar to to a extra social system and acclimating to the rapid pace of globalization. Freezing, a 1994 exhibit of sedated animals in Sofia’s National Museum of Natural History (Bulgaria) pointed to the moribund confess of museums in Bulgaria, grossly out-of-sync in the expose of the usual pace of events. Perhaps Tcherkelov’s most well-known work from his series of interventions is Suitable Suit, a video yet from which served as the cover of Menschenbilder: Foto- und Videokunst aus Bulgarien. In this video the artiste lumbers through a arena in a conflict many sizes too large. Tcherkelov’s analysis of Bulgarian outfit culminated in Reality Show (1998), a video that, with numerous art historical references, satirizes the affluence and decadence of the international film and music industry transferred to Sofia.

In 1995, Tcherkelov studied impasto painting similar to Jörg Immendorff in Amsterdam similar to a inherit from the Felix Meritis Foundation. Not until he arrived in New York City in 2000, however, did he begin to pretense exclusively using this technique. Art critic Eleanor Heartney, in an launch to Tcherkelov’s series of impasto paintings based on images from currency, writes that they present “symbols mined from American currency as keys to comprehend national dreams and fantasies.” Concentrating on details in both supplementary and obsolescent forms of money, Tcherkelov “exhumes their meanings and contradictions, revealing the subliminal skill that currency images have.” Artist, musician, and player Genesis P-Orridge writes of one of Tcherkelov’s paintings that “it seemed to explode subsequent to sheer exuberance.” He continues: “We surprise how the artiste trapped a full of beans spirit inside the painting and nevertheless maintained its happiness!”.

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Tcherkelov cites the panic in the Bulgarian banking sector in the 1990s, which annoyed the handing out to devaluate the national currency, the Lev, by removing three zeroes, as the initial impetus that drove his consideration, from an aesthetic perspective, of the symbolic gift of money. He plus points to his dawn in New York as an immigrant, and his reliance upon coins to make calls from payphones, as having “left with the feeling of communication,” and that allowance is a component of expression. Cultural critic Georgette Gouveia clarification that Houben’s aesthetic “is partnered to 20th-century Pop Art, but rather than focus upon manufactured Pepsi-Cola or Brillo boxes as Warhol famously did, he focuses upon the financial instruments that are engines of wealth.”

In 2011, Houben was selected to represent Bulgaria in the 54th Venice Biennale.

In February and March 2018, Houben held solo shows at the National Art Gallery (Bulgaria), Sofia Arsenal and the National Archaeological Museum (Bulgaria), both in Sofia. In interviews, Houben was asked to chat about the role of art in the age of digitalization and bitcoin. The mission of art “is in the statics – to End the flying time, to talk with the past, and similar to the future,” Tcherkelov stated. “To not approach into ephemera, unlike the built-in interchangeability of almost all that surrounds us. In 25 years, artificial intelligence will make many professions redundant, but there will be room for received human to-do that cannot be multiplied or created by robots.”

From November 2020 through March 2021, Houben held a solo enactment at the Museum of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. The museum director, Margarita Dorovska, described Houben’s works as “beyond generous to the viewer” who is “compelled to move going on for and is nevertheless never clear to have seen it all.” In order to experience Houben’s works, “ne has to move, to regulate their stance, to exhaust the spatial relations, and there will still be an elusive remainder.”

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