Sofia Art Fair 2026

Sofia Art Fair is the first international exhibition of its kind for contemporary visual art in Bulgaria, which creates an organized market environment for works of art. It brings together over 80 artists and 27 galleries from 14 countries.

At the fair we will be showing new works by Natalia Jordanova and Mirjam Vreeswijk.

Natalia Jordanova (1991, Sofia, Bulgaria) will present neon works that originate from an earlier project presented during her 2020 BAZA nomination, which marked the beginning of her engagement with artificial intelligence. At a time when people knew little about what was to come, the work combined 3,500 AI-generated images with an essayistic wall text reflecting on the meaning and transformation of images in the age of artificial intelligence. Five years later fragments of that text were reactivated into a series of autonomous neon works, with the name The Cave is not a Clock (2025).

In Jordanova’s idea-driven installation practice, where the specificity of media dissolves, the choice of neon came from the need to draw on the history of conceptual art in which language itself became material, image and object. The phrases move between statement as message, image as artefact and inscription. Reappearing as luminous forms, they function like contemporary petroglyphs, marks that carry language across different temporal layers and suggest a speculative archaeology in which timelines collapse.

A flat ontology underpins the constellation of works, where text, image, object, technological process and bodily gesture exist on equal footing. The phrases I used to be a word, now I’m an image, thank you, machine, flat ontology and Data is Aura reflect on the shifting relationships between language, images and algorithmic systems without resolving them into a single narrative.

The hands introduce another temporal layer. The outline of a six-fingered hand incorporates a familiar error of AI-generated imagery, bridging prehistoric cave markings with algorithmic glitch. In Mutual Signal, two hands derived from cave imagery appear as a gesture of contact, communication or recognition. Together the works trace layered and cyclical histories of image-making, in which the ancient handprint, the written word and the computational image become substitute, translation or continuation of the other.

Mirjam Vreeswijk
In her paintings, Mirjam Vreeswijk (Gorinchem, NL, 1997) seeks the ultimate paradox: capturing the intangible. Where she previously sought to capture elusive natural phenomena such as mist, fire and water for eternity, in her latest series she defies time through the act of painting itself.

Here, the emphasis lies less on the subject and all the more on the act itself. Capturing and controlling transience is interwoven with the creative process. In creating her compositions, she crafts her own reality, based on models or sets she builds herself. Within this, she determines the world, the time and the light. Everything obeys her rules.

This process treads a fine line between absolute control and surrender. Whilst the composition demands direction, the act of painting itself compels her to let go of control. By applying transparent layers on top of one another, a dialogue with the canvas emerges. Objects lose their original function and merge together.

A recurring motif in this visual language is her own face. Not as a traditional self-portrait, but as a form that is always at hand. It offers her the autonomy and freedom to experiment to her heart’s content. Her face functions purely as a mould — an anonymous material with which she dictates the laws of the world she has created.

Our presentation at Sofia Art Fair was generously supported by the Dutch Embassy in Bulgaria.