Bulgaria, 1967
Catherine Tomova is a Bulgarian visual artist whose practice spans more than three decades. Working primarily through painting, she explores the unstable boundary between figuration and abstraction, using portraiture, the human figure and fragments of lived experience as points of departure. Her work investigates memory, psychological space, identity and the processes through which images dissolve, fragment and transform. Through successive series and exhibition projects, Tomova develops a sustained inquiry into presence, absence and the fragile structures that shape human perception.
EDUCATION
1990 — École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026
Municipal Art Gallery Varna, Bulgaria
Curator: Rumen Serafimov
Municipal Art Gallery Kazanluk, Bulgaria
Curator: Rumen Serafimov
2025
Im/Possible Shelters (Retrospective Exhibition)
Bulgarian Artists Association (Shipka 6), Sofia, Bulgaria
Curator: Plamen Petrov
2024
Small Formats
INTRO Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2023
Entropy
Nuance Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2021
Paint It Dark
Nuance Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2019
Thorny Delights
Nuance Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2018
The Island at Noon
Stubel Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2017
Devolution
Contrast Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
Curator: Maria Vassileva
2016
Distances
Stubel Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2015
150 × 210
Yuzina Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2005
Artamontzev Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2003
Irida Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
2002
Cyclops Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
1998
Galerie Gautier, Saarlouis, Germany
1997
Makta Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
1995
Mona Gallery, Limassol, Cyprus
1993
Apollo & Mercury Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
1992
Bulgarian Artists Association Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
1988
First Solo Exhibition, Youth Theater. Sofia, Bulgaria
SELECTED INTERNATIONAL AND GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023
The Brick, Process – Space Contemporary Art Festival, Balchik, Bulgaria
2022
Art as Resistance Forum, Varna, Bulgaria
2020
MAMAG Museum of Modern Art, Austria
2019
Murano Art Expo, Venice, Italy
2018
4th International ARvesT Expo Biennale, Yerevan, Armenia
2013
Hospital For People In Love
Rayko Alexiev Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
1991
Exhibition of Bulgarian Artists, Paris, France
1989–1992
Salon d’Automne, Paris, France
1996
International Triennial of Realist Painting, Sofia, Bulgaria
RESIDENCIES, AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS
2017
Residency Award, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France
2016
Nominee, Annual Painting Award, Union of Bulgarian Artists
2016
Shortlisted, Allianz Art Awards, Bulgaria
CURATORIAL COLLABORATIONS
Maria Vassileva
Contrast Gallery, Sofia
Plamen Petrov
Bulgarian Artists Association Gallery, Sofia
Rumen Serafimov
Municipal Art Gallery Varna; City Art Gallery Kazanluk
Dimiter Grozdanov
Bulgarian Artists Association Gallery, Sofia
Hristina Bobokova
Process – Space Contemporary Art Festival
MEMBERSHIPS IN ART ORGANIZATIONS
Since 1994 — Union of Bulgarian Artists (Painting Section)
COLLECTIONS
Private collections in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Cyprus and other European countries.
PUBLICATIONS AND CATALOGUES
Selected exhibition catalogues, reviews and publications.
Detailed bibliography available upon request.
Artist’s Statement
Every painting starts with a centre.
Sometimes it is a face, a human figure, a memory, a gesture or a detail that has caught my attention and refuses to disappear. I begin from something concrete, but I do not remain there. Painting is a way of entering the inner structure of an image, of breaking it apart and following its fragments into unexpected territories.
What interests me is not the portrait itself, but what lies beneath it. Not the visible form, but the layers of experience, memory and emotion from which it is made. As I work, images lose their fixed boundaries. They become unstable, shifting between recognition and disappearance, between presence and absence, between figure and abstraction.
I have never been interested in abstraction as a purely formal exercise. For me, abstraction appears when an image can no longer contain the complexity of what it carries. It emerges through the process of searching, dismantling and rebuilding. The painting becomes a field where psychological states, remembered experiences and imagined spaces coexist.
Throughout my work, I return to questions of identity, distance, vulnerability and shelter. I am drawn to moments when certainty begins to dissolve and when the image reveals something beyond its own appearance.
Painting is my way of approaching those hidden territories.