Ceramics are an important component in Martina Vacheva’s work. The artist’s impasto and generous painting style finds an equivalent and appropriate form of implementation in the malleable material. Vacheva’s uncommonly brisk brush or pencil becomes even more vividly perceptible in the kneading and working of clay and the resulting plasticity.

Martina Vacheva takes her motifs from entertainment media, television series, fairy tales and myths. She creates “surreal chamber pieces” (Thomas D. Trummer), pseudo-archaeological finds or sceneries in which screen heroes and heroines from her childhood and youth in the 1990s are revived in an ironic and humorous way.

The mask of darkling mystic is based on a Bulgarian fairy tale with an unfortunate princess at its center. Her potential bridegrooms always find death. A cunning young man is finally able to defeat the murderous snake that lashes out of the princess's mouth and thus break the spell. The grotesque half-creature recalls the attitude of “bad painting”. The absurd-expressive mien of its face, the supposedly simple technical realization, the undefined colorfulness represent a departure from what is generally understood by 'good' taste. The wall relief, to which one could trace an art-historical relationship from the ancient Bocca della Verità to Martin Kippenberger's famous frog, both in form and content, is captivating in its dynamism. With branches from the neighborhood of the studio, the wall becomes a forest and the snake comes even more clearly to the fore as an eternally valid symbol of seduction and untamable nature.

Heike Maier-Rieper, 2021 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)