INCOGNITO GAMES – solo exhibition by Nikola Tsvetanov

INCOGNITO GAMES
Nikola Tsvetanov, solo show
Curator: Philip Stoilov
11.03. – 05.04.2025
Atelie 28 Gallery
In his new solo exhibition, Nikola Tsvetanov combines the traditional iconographic form and
the modern approaches of post-digital art in images of an anonymous creative experience
which splices the classical techniques of fine arts and the virtual spaces of computer
gaming.
The principal idea of ​​the exhibition is the interaction between historically contextualized
forms of art and the purely technical mode of art production. In this dynamic dialogue, the
author remolds his personal mythologies into complex and fluid images of computer pixels,
codes, matrices, console controllers – symbolic avatars of an archetypal multiplayer mode.
The works unfold an entire universe of game models and countless players where the
specific irreducibility of the inner experience forms a continuum between the artist’s
individual design and the anonymous gameplay of his craft. The icon as a medium is
connected to the traditional notion of a visual code that fixes the image beyond time.
Tsvetanov’s peculiar icons replace the idea of ​​a contextually codified and impermanent
image with representations of the very process of coding and decoding, of a hyperdynamic
viral multiplication of visual motifs in the form of a game where the artist (from the
iconographer to the animator) finds himself immersed by virtue of a never-ending dialectical
process of adaptation and overcoming, of assimilation and negation.
Nikola Tsvetanov was born in 1998 in Sofia. In 2017, he graduated from the National
Secondary School of Fine Arts “Iliya Petrov”, majoring in “Book Illustration and Design”. He
studied for one year in the “Visual Arts” program at New Bulgarian University (2017 – 2018).
In 2018, he was accepted as a student at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia where he
received a master’s degree in the “Graphic Arts” major in 2024. The same year he
specialized at the Arte Ederren Fakultatea UPV/EHU (Bilbao, Spain) and worked on
probation as an assistant to Professor David Arteagoitia in the field of contemporary graphic
arts. He has participated in numerous local and international exhibitions: Drawing as a Way
of Thinking, Atelie 28 Gallery, Sofia (2025); Sofia Underground – International Performance
Art Festival (2023); Residency for Contemporary Graphic Print in North Macedonia,
exhibition in Bogdanci and Skopje (2023); Daring to Defy the Status Quo – double-fold
exhibition in Doza Gallery, Sofia and Aether Haga, Netherlands (2023); 9 Park Camp,
Trebišov, Slovakia; Cold. Warm. Warmer. Hot., Academy of Arts Gallery in Banská Bystrica,
Slovakia (2022-2023); Game Lover, Arosita Gallery, Sofia (2022); System Change, Anyway
or a Sense of Painting, Art Center Bankya, Sofia (2022); Rearrangement of Layers – 32nd
Festival "Process – Space", Balchik (2021); Third National Graphic Arts Competition –
Classical Techniques, Sredets Gallery, Sofia (2021).