Intimacy: Jenny Ivanova lets us a little closer

It’s strange how much we want to be understood,

and how carefully we sometimes hide the very things that would make it possible. We want closeness, but fear the vulnerability it brings. We want someone to know us properly, while reserving the right to choose which parts they see. Those contradictions gave rise to Intimacy, an exhibition by Jenny Ivanova, a contemporary Bulgarian artist exploring what portraiture can be in the 21st century.

There’s something of jazz in Ivanova’s paintings,

along with a love of French aesthetics, deft contrasts and figures that reward a second look. The exhibition brings together seven oil paintings and seven drawings, all made especially for the show. Through them, Ivanova explores different kinds of closeness: the physical intimacy that connects us to someone else, and the almost invisible bond between an artist and the act of drawing. Her vivid canvases consider what it means to be vulnerable before another person and question the barriers we put between ourselves and the world. Fluid, fragmented figures often seem to look straight through the viewer. It’s figurative painting with a decorative sensibility, informed by Art Deco and European modernism. Intimacy opens on 4 November 2026 at 18:00 at Velmar Jewelry House, 51 Vasil Levski Boulevard, and runs until 3 December.

Speaking about its beginnings, Ivanova says: “Over the past few years, I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to understand myself. I encountered sides of myself I would probably have preferred not to meet, given the choice. I discovered contradictions I’d long ignored and fears I thought I’d already overcome. Gradually, I began to notice that

the more I understood myself, the more clearly I could see how I stopped other people from understanding me.

I had well-practised ways of being close to someone without revealing myself completely. Of speaking honestly, but not about everything. Of letting someone in, but only as far as I could without having to defend myself. For a long time, I didn’t even realise I was doing it.”

Ivanova is fascinated by the human face, especially the icon-like gaze that seems to follow you around a room: a gaze that belongs to consciousness as much as to the eyes. Perhaps that’s because the face is the first place we look for another person.

Painting still has the power to slow us down.

It gives us back the time to do more than look: to contemplate. Ivanova believes it’s in that pause that we begin to see ourselves as well as the painting. Her figures inhabit a space where time has stopped long enough for us to hear our own silence.

Sofia exhibitions to catch this autumn

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