KANTCHO KANEV

The artist

Born in Obretenik, Bulgaria on October 18th 1957. In 1970 he graduated from School of Arts in Ruse, Bulgaria. Since 1990 Kantcho Kanev lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands.

So, coming from oldest Europe, Kanev’s attitude towards mythology is explicit: it is the very source of his search for contemporary visual cosmogonies. For a 20th century artist, the perpetuation of these time-honoured themes involves artistic paraphrasing ages of old traditions of great religious art. Working within an abstract vocabulary which does utilize such spiritual territories Kanev create identity of individualized history.

Being Bulgaria Kanev has the capacity to present artistic themes in his own poetic language. Deeply imbedded in his enriched metaphors is his sense of divinity of boundless pictorial planes and voids where his iconoclastic attitude conducts the visualization of transcendental experience. The poetic use of visual symbols, segmentations of memory, or elemental phenomena of nature, like celestial bodies, distant skies, nocturnal landscapes coming either from Apollinic cosmogony or Judeo-Christian pictograms are represented in his unique way so sensible for it’s unspoiled origins His ‘Hymn’- series reveal the symbolic contours of a masterful artistic translation of ubiquous tradition of antiquity. These wonderful hymns of colour and lines give us ideas of melody, harmony and rhythm, and the impression that we get from Kanev’s pictures is almost a musical one. Kanev’s painting become music, and moves us by the immediacy of its sensuous presence.

His works are in the following institutions:

The National Art Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
- Tama-Art-University-Museum, Tokyo, J
- Kuala Lumpur Museum, Malaysia.
- Joensun Taidmuseum, Joensuum,
Finland
- Nikola Marinov Museum, Targovishte,
Bulgaria
- Ruse City Gallery, Bulgaria
- ABN-AMRO bank, The Netherlands.
- And many other private collections all
over the world.