The exhibition ‘True Colours’ is the collaboration of five artists fromdifferent backgrounds and age groups showing a diverse approachto painting, sculpture andphotography.
The group consists of two Bulgarian artists, Vania Goshe, a versatile painter, and Bogdan Dyulgerov, a painter and a sculptor and three Maltese artists: Charles Bonnici, a sculptor who specialises in stone carving, well-known photographer Kevin Casha and Nicole Casha an emerging artist, the youngest of the group.
The group decided to start this collaboration after their successful participation at the Notte Bianca festival in Valletta in the last few years. The concept of the exhibition is to interact with the public and give the opportunity to people to learn more about the essential value of art as a human potential and articulate investment.
Bonnici is one of the very few artists in Malta who experiments continuously with Maltese stone. His sculpture is mostly figurative and expresses the beauty of the human form. He explores form and shape through solid mass and creates images that reflect the visible and hidden world.
When looking at Bonnici’s sculpture, one observes that simplicity dominates his compositions. The artist feels that simplicity is found even in a piece of earth which he then transforms into somethingtangible and conveys a meaning. His thematic approach embodies diverse emotions like sensuality, provocativeness, playfulness, and joy which we encounter throughout our life.
Bonnici was born in 1943 and studied art between 1959 and 1962 at the New York City School of Art and Design, at the New York Studio of painting and Sculpture, in Manhattan and at Bridgeview School of Sculpture in Queens, New York.
Dyulgerov is a versatile painter and sculptor from Bulgaria. He was born in 1965 and resides in Malta. In his sculpture, Dyulgerov creates anthropomorphic figures in plaster which later are casted in bronze, his favourite medium.
Strange creatures loom in space and convey a surreal, bizarre and mysterious world. These images are sometimes also reflected in many of his abstract paintings. In this exhibition, Dyulgerov is showing figurative work and abstract images expressed in painting and sculpture.
He had nine solo exhibitions and participated in numerous collective exhibitions in Bulgaria, France,Belgium and Luxemburg. His sculptures and paintings are found in private collections in Europe.
The art of photography is represented by photographer Casha. His work achieved great recognition in Malta and abroad and his career in professional photography spans more than 30 years. The artist won several awards in Malta and many other foreign countries and honoured as the top photographer of the year. For some years, Casha was also the president of the Malta Photographic Society and currently he is the founder and chairman of the Malta Institute of ProfessionalPhotography (MIPP).
Casha is presenting a series of interesting works covering subjects like portraiture, landscape, and other experiments in digital photography exploring themes of identity, human reality and nature. Casha is also known for his photographic contribution to several prestigious publications. He organises many photography courses, especially Master’s courses.
Goshe, who was born in 1976, comes from the southeast ofBulgaria. She studied cinema, television and advertising at the new Bulgarian University in Sofia where she graduated. She also pursued art classes in drawing and painting. In 2008, Vania settled in Malta and since then the artist took part in collective and personal art exhibitions.
Her preferred materials are acrylics and pastel but she also works in other mediums. Goshe, a multi-faceted artist, is an excellent portrait painter. She achieves great results when creating realistic and intricate portraits that truly capture the likeness of the individuals she portrays. Since the artist came to Malta, she finds inspiration in the climatic conditions of the Mediterranean: light, sunshine, lush vegetation and architectural beauty which form part of the Maltese landscape.
Intriguing are her latest abstract compositions expressed with vibrant colours and striking forms. Her positive outlook towards the world stimulate her imagination to convey great depth and meaning with an optimistic portrayal of life and the universe.
The youngest artist of the group is Casha, a graduate in Art History from the University of Malta. Casha experiments with a variety of mediums which include acrylics, oil, watercolour, ink, chalk and other mediums. Her paintings are highly symbolical, sometimes verging to abstraction.
She is inspired by the surrounding environment and personal experience. The artist’s expressive power in these creations describes a tangible world of forms that she assembles and reshapes in an extraordinary manner.
Patchwork of intense colour, spontaneous squiggles of flowing lines, contours and forms capture the eyes of the observers, and find themselves immersed in the sheer depths of these energetic works.
Her primitivistic qualities of her raw simplicity of the designs give her paintings power and energy. Today, Casha continues to research using other means of expression, especially computer generated design work.
‘True Colours’ will be open at the Society of the Arts, Palazzo de La Salle, Valletta, until May 21. The artists will be present demonstrating their techniques and materials during opening times.