New artist-in-residence: Gergana Tabakova

Shifting Horizons, detail, 2025, variable size, machine embroidery on felt.

Shifting Horizons, detail, 2025, variable size, machine embroidery on felt.

Gergana Tabakova explores how the spaces we inhabit are shaped by architecture, objects, decoration, and everyday materials, and how these seemingly stable structures reflect social conventions and cultural habits. While painting remains the starting point of her work, she moves beyond the traditional canvas, engaging with architectural forms, textiles, ornaments, and decorative motifs as carriers of memory and meaning.

Through fragmentation, Tabakova disrupts established systems of order, creating moments of imbalance and unexpected connections between individual elements. In this process, material and decorative forms become traces of narratives related to the home, labor, gender roles, personal experience, and collective traditions.

Her work develops a dynamic and open-ended visual language in which painting, materiality, and spatial structures continuously intersect and reconfigure one another.

Gergana Tabakova is a visual artist based in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds an MA and PhD in Painting from the National Academy of Arts, Sofia, where she is currently an assistant professor in the Textile - Art and Design Department. She has exhibited in many solo and group shows, in Bulgaria and abroad; in 2025 she was featured in the 5th Hangzhou Triennial of Fibert Art, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China.