M.Y. ART PROSPECTS is pleased to present Please, Remain Seated, a solo exhibition by Yana Dimitrova, from February 12th through the 28th. Opening reception will be held on February 12, from 6-8pm.

Please, Remain Seated is a new painting installation by a young Bulgarian-born artist who investigates the nature of escape through the pictorial narrative with sophisticated representational style. Following the academic tradition of figurative painting and the influence of Byzantine murals and social realist monuments, Dimitrova creates an installation that transforms the exhibition space into a transitory environment of ‘non-space,’ suspending a viewer between past, present, and future. Subdued colors and a sepia tone of her painting evoke a sense of nostalgia for distant memories and a psychological discomfort of relocation.

Dimitrova’s painted subjects are drawn from personal memories combined with sociological/ideological research, and her references are as intimate as a family album and as social/industrial as a vessel of transportation or a modern apartment building. Collectively, they serve as a metaphor for the immigrant’s existence. The repetitive representation of a single subject such as a chair, an assembly line worker, or an aircraft passenger conveys shifting states of escape/confinement in collective/individual territories. Her use of curved or window-shaped canvases enhance an illusion, mimicking the physical space and textures of architectural components in the manner of the trompe l’oeil tradition in Europe.

Yana Dimitrovastudied at the School for Fine Arts and Culture “Acd. Ilia Petrov” in Sofia, Bulgaria. After relocating to the U.S. in 2002, she studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah and Atlanta, GA. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including shows at Gallery Twenty-Four in Berlin, Germany and shows in the UK, Eastern Europe and around the US. Dimitrova currently lives in New York City.