RUDI NINOV

Rudi Ninov (Teteven, Bulgaria, 1992) lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany.

His practice, comprised of drawing, sculpture and painting, documents intimate bonds between two distinctive approaches within his work: the formal and personal, the abstract and figurative. His work combines opulent shapes within carefully chosen coloured planes and clearly outlined borders, imbued with references to music, collected objects, comic strip cutouts and written notes of fictional stories and poetry. His paintings are like imaginary scriptures which meditate upon compositions of oral and written languages in a form of synaesthetic personal experiences.

His often surprising and virtuous treatment of the painting surface results in immaculate vibrant colours produced by complex processes of layering and washing away of thinly applied paint, which shift away like film slides from one painting to another, creating ongoing dialogues between bodies of work. Often several paintings will come together to create diptychs and larger compositions — a form of diagrammatic exchange which is a reference to Rudi’s ongoing interest in cinematographic mechanisms of early animation films. He works in a gestural and tactile format, using both intuitive and reasoned procedures. His work has a unique command of drawing-into-painting, and painting-into-form, demonstrating a kind of spontaneity in a process-based exploration.

He earned a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2015 and a MFA in the class of Monika Baer, Amy Sillman and Nikolas Gambaroff at Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany in 2021.

Recent exhibitions include Writing Paintings, GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano (2023); ORBIT, Messeturm, Frankfurt am Main (2020), The Artist-Collector’s Dream (a nice thing), GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano (2020), Gravitiy Works Only When You Look Down, Vaska Emanuilova Gallery, Sofia (2019), FOTEL, Sotheby’s, Frankfurt am Main (2019).

He is also the recipient of the Linklaters LLP Prize, Germany (2020) and Cultural Perspectives Foundation Scholarship, Bulgaria (2019).

His works are part of the Museum Voorlinden, Caldic Collection, Wassenaar, The Netherlands; Fondazione CRC, Cuneo, Italy;  Imago Mundi Collection, Treviso, Italy.