Boré Ivanoff

b. 1968, Bulgarian-French

Biography

Boré Ivanoff, born in Stara Zagora in Bulgaria in 1968, is a contemporary painter currently working and residing between Paris and the South-West of France. At the turn of the new millennium, Ivanoff moved from Bulgaria to the French capital, and started painting up to today.

Originally from a country characterized by its widely stretched plains and its dazzling mountains, Bulgaria, the contemporary painter Boré Ivanoff could be defined at first glance as a realistic artist, according to the literary theory of the XIXth century transposed to the visual arts. He transform the daily life of the city – Paris to be more precise – into a pictorial motif.

After many trips, he moved to Paris in the early 2000s to cultivate his passion for urban architecture. He designs a series of paintings paying homage to the sparkles of the City of Light. Attentive to the shimmering of each ray of the sun on the facades, he works to capture the changing character of the city, how he would like to reflect the uniqueness of a person’s features.

One could state Boré Ivanoff creates portraits of Paris. His technique recreates the feel and spirit of places chosen for their sublime character, both beautiful, and disturbing. The touch is subtle. The inverted image transfigures reality by passing from the eye filter to the lens of the camera, to the sensitive gaze of the painter. Boré Ivanoff seizes on a story. His works set out to discover the genealogy of the beings who lived in these places.

Classic? Romantic? Undoubtedly, they are more part of a naturalistic approach where the body and its impregnation in space play a role in the restoration of these urban landscapes. Unless they derive from a magical realism, this current invented to describe the eruption of the imaginary in a scene with smooth appearances?

Slavic tales speak of the existence of a creature, Baba Yaga, whose world you could only enter through a mirror. With this series of reflective paintings, Boré Ivanoff invents new legends. Does he want to verify with all his mirrors that symmetry would not exist more in the city than in nature, like the painters who, since antiquity, ensure that the proportions are right and faithful to reality?

With these reflections, showcases, games of transparency, dizzying perspectives, shimmers and the effects of aquatic movements, Boré Ivanoff borrows the laws of pictorial academism, to better and subvert it. Bore Ivanoff’s art is a demonstration that shows how the overall quality of a resolutely contemporary composition, and the pictorial solutions associated with an intentional abstraction, can be used to represent a non-conventional subject.

A pure palette for discerning eyes, where each of the ‘flavors’ is a mixture, composed of ingredients whose exact proportions are known only to the author. A work that represents neither a physical, nor a metaphysical entity outside of it, and resists any attempt to fit it into existing categories, or to explain it as an exercise deliberately insincere in a formal anachronism and pictorial.

Career Facts

Bore Ivanoff enjoys a dynamic international career with his works exhibited across Europa, and featuring in various public and private collections.

After several exhibitions in Bulgaria around the 1990s, Boré Ivanoff takes on the Paris art scene, before showcasing his work internationally. As a result, Boré Ivanoff has exhibited in France, Bulgaria, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom.