The many tangled figures of Preslav Kostov’s imposing paintings jostle against one another, groping and clutching, and stay suspended in action, as in history painting, but remain untethered from any specific narrative, any grounding element that may lend itself to easy interpretation. With a lugubrious palette drawn from Old Masters paintings, and a sense of figurative distortion recalling certain works by Francis Bacon, such expressions of painterly virtuosity at !rst obscure Kostov’s seemingly automatist approach to composition, both the surrealist kind, in the lineage of Andre Masson, and the sort of uncanny images produced in recent years by artifical intelligence programs. Whether referring to the bardo or the algorithm, these paintings seem to emerge from an interstitial space between aggression and eroticism, the actual and the virtual, the historical and the present – a liminality informed by Kostov’s own personal histories, his acute understanding of immigrant experience and identity formation.

Preslav Kostov (b. 1998, Bulgaria) lives and works in London, UK. Kostov received his BA at Leeds Arts University (Leeds, UK) in 2020, and received his MA at Royal College of Art (London, UK) in 2023. Selected exhibitions include: “Between the !ve wells,” Tara Downs, New York, US (2024); “Notes Toward a Shell,” Tara Downs, New York, US (2024); “So"er, So"est,” Guts Gallery, London, UK (2024); “Beauty in chaos,” Hew Hood Gallery, London, UK (2024); “The Arcadian Dream, Spurs Gallery, Beijing, CN (2024); “New Now,” Guts Gallery, London, UK (2023); “Manifest,” SixtySix London, London, UK (2023); “Touch-a-touch-a-touch-me, Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery, London, UK (2023); “From The Cloud,” Baert Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2023); “Skin Deep,” Studio West Gallery, London, UK (2023); “A consciousness harnessed to #esh,” D Contemporary, London, UK (2023); “Now introducing 2022,” Studio West Gallery, London, UK (2022).