Prima Center Berlin

"SPIRITUAL GOLD"
Tatjana Maneva

The young and extraordinary painter and graphic artist Tatjana Maneva is an extraordinarily well educated personality and master of the visual art skills. Her personality, talent, knowledge and creative ambition constitute a rare complex, expressed through various works in different genres. The young artist, student and post graduate student of the art master Dinka Tancev is interested in a large spectrum of topics and visual forms; her production is important and many-sided as if she is an older author. As an urban and high cultured personality, naturally, Maneva is a representative of the post modern conception and this contemporary procedee is her original orientation, it’s her own esthetic attitude. The most important thing is that whatever she touches, she makes it very good and very likable. Thus enlarging the visual scene of our culture it is also important that she makes us to face her various visual and spiritual inspirations and preoccupations.

Now Maneva has taken new steps in her opus. Her latest exhibition is inspired by the depths and predestined messages of the Chinese horoscope. Only a well educated personality like Tatjana Maneva, with sense for various aspects of life, amazed in front of the phenomena (where the philosophy is originating from!) and with a spiritual power to understand the essence, can link into a creative chain the persons that are apart from each other in the sense of centuries and kilometers. The wholeness of the new creations comes out of Maneva’s refined spirituality, although at the same time there is an announcement of a creative singularity of good art works that are expression of the artistic powers of the author.

This exhibition is dedicated to the discourse of Tatjana Maneva with a complex and distant spirituality. This also is familiar to us all who are closed in our own shells trying to hear the songs of distant places. In this universal world of ours we are all connected through the education and natural threads. Today Buddhism is an essential ethic idea, and the Chinese horoscope comes out from it. Buddha, who loved all the forms of life and taught people to wake up and be serious in giving meaning and leading a life, invited all the animals in order to celebrate the New Year. There came only 12 of them. In honor of those who wished to share the joy of common existence, Buddha named the 12 horoscope forms according to their names, later on to become known as Chinese astrological world-view. The duration of a cycle is 12 years, and each year is under one of those signs. These 12 groups at the same time are earthly tribes, kind of people who keep the characteristics of the sign under which they were born. This fascinating story is alive in the spiritual activity of the East, now of the West too, it is a story that incited Tatjana Maneva to create the series Horoscopes.

The extraordinary works of the young artist are a range going to become well known in our arts and in our spiritual living. In these works Maneva invested all her cognitive and visual capacities. These works are full of sense, beauty, meanings and messages. They make us rejoice as they made their author while creating them, and they make us think how much the artist was concentrated to get at the essence of the horoscope system, in each symbol and their interpretation. The visual method is very simple. For Chinese ideograms, that have their own information and visual value Maneva has processed an additional visual base consisted of developed colorist and graphic structures. The aim is to establish a more complex visual unity, to make completed visual entities, each of the 12 signs separately and together offer a complex communication and discourse on the essence of life, on the depth of the venture of mind, the beauty of the existence, on the man’s power to dive into the secrets of the world, in its circle courses and individual destinies, which are different for everybody but yet same for thousands in the sense of billions of people. The works are full of dialectics – with dialogue with another civilization, the antagonism between the idea and the reality, clash and getting at the essence of the tone values. The black color of the Chinese ideograms, which at the same are both beauty and an idea that makes sense (which we can not read and understand it somehow) and the exact and playful colors, makes the works of Tatjana Maneva impressive visual objects which both separately and together as a system, act admiringly – they are spiritually powerful, visually rich and ethically firm.

This group of works once again presents Tatjana Maneva as a particular, rare and extraordinarily interesting visual artist, who makes spiritual gold of anything she touches.

Kiril Temkov, PhD