In brief
From November 3 to 21, Sofia’s Serdica Gallery hosted Valka Parusheva’s exhibition *Layers*, featuring 26 textile‐based abstract works that explore the layered nature of consciousness through subtle textures and minimal geometry. The shows sparked discussion on the intersection of fabric and psyche.
From 3 to 21 November, Serdica Gallery in Sofia opened its doors to 26 abstract works by Bulgarian artist Valka Parusheva, a textile‑focused piece titled Layers that invites visitors to contemplate the buildup of layers in human consciousness. The exhibition ran for three weeks, offering a new‐fangled exploration of how memory, emotion and perception merge over time.
The works were created over the past two years using a specific textile fabric in which each individual thread appears like a pixel when viewed up close. From a distance, the minute stitches coalesce into translucent colour fields that blend into one another. The effect is designed to echo the gradual accumulation of experience in mind and spirit.
“I would like this exhibition to convey a sense of warm human presence and offer a purely aesthetic experience,” Parusheva says. The statement appears beside a central piece where the fabric’s hue shifts from soft blue to mellow amber as the eye moves from foreground to background.
Parusheva’s work combines materials, colours and geometric shapes, striving for a balance between minimalism and compositional complexity. The textures evoke a sense of quiet, almost meditative space where viewers feel both the weight of depth and the lightness of transparency.
Born in 1969 in Sliven, southeastern Bulgaria, Parusheva studied artistic textiles at the Dimitar Dobrovich School of Applied Arts, graduating in 1988. She has held seven solo shows, participated in national group exhibitions since 1991 and received a “Textile Art” award from the Union of Bulgarian Artists at the Grass and Water National Exhibition in 2026.
Her accolades also include recognition at the Dissonances National Exhibition and the Sirak Skitnik National Exhibition, where she was honoured for unconventional forms in 2024 and for being an artist from the host city of Sliven in 2018. In 2016, she took part in an artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Valka Parusheva works in contemporary art, textiles and graphic design, and her works are held in the collections of the Union of Bulgarian Artists, art galleries in Sliven, Yambol and Ruse, as well as in private collections across Bulgaria and abroad.
The exhibition’s theme of layered consciousness is presented through the visual language of embroidered threads and geometric arrangement, but the precise implications of the metaphor remain open to individual interpretation. Visitors were encouraged to reflect on how memories and emotions build over time, yet the artist offers no definitive explanation of how the textile mechanism maps onto psychological reality.
During the opening night, local journalists noted the calm atmosphere that seemed to radiate from the fabric installations. While critics praised the technical mastery of the micro‑thread technique, some questioned whether the abstraction successfully communicates a tangible psychological experience.
No formal educational program accompanied the exhibition, and the gallery did not report plans for a touring version of the show. Similarly, though Parusheva’s text alludes to a broader discourse on consciousness, the source does not specify whether the exhibition will integrate interactive or multi‑sensory components beyond the visual aspect.
The gallery’s move to feature a textile‑focused narrative signals a growing interest in the intersection of craft and contemporary research on perception. That shift, however, is not explicitly endorsed by documentation from the Union of Bulgarian Artists, and the source does not indicate any official collaboration between the artist and scientific institutions on the subject of layered cognition.
The uncertainties that the covered materials explicitly identify include: the role of individual interpretation in understanding the symbolic layering of consciousness as depicted by the artist; the absence of a defined explanatory framework linking textile technique to psychological theory; and the lack of announced further development or expansion of the exhibition beyond the 21‑day run at Serdica Gallery.
