Vanitas Reframed

2025

selection of etchings, intaglio prints on paper

20 x 28 cm (sheet)

‘Vanitas Reframed’, was developed in New York in 2025 during my long-term residency at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, supported by the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and the American Foundation for Bulgaria.

The series is based on 17th-century vanitas portraiture, working with over- recurring images such as a female body with a mirror and a skull. These images are treated as psychic clichés, which the work inhabits in order to undo them from within. It is all about the abstract forces that push and pull. Here, figuration serves only as an armature for sensation.

The image forms through continuous stages of reworking. It begins with photographs. I observe: where does my body tighten, spasm, soften. Thefigure is repeatedly rescaled and redrawn on tracing paper. Line and image are built up, erased, and rebuilt. Etching fixes the line as physical, imprinted. The body is abstracted further and further away from itself to turn back onto itself. Can embodiment be reached through depiction?

Lines operate within systems of rhythmic tensions: thick versus thin contours, abstract versus figurative zones, condensation versus emptiness, immediacy versus longitude, tightening versus expanding muscles, delimited versus dispersed bodies. Fast, intuitive gestures coexist with consciously reworked ones. Categorical lines force the body into existence - my pencil breaks each time. Soft lines record every shaking of my hand, moving with my breath. The body lives between these tensions, unfolds.