Liuba

Critical text

Liuba Boyadjieva (1923, Sofia 2005, Paris), better known by her own choice with her first name only in capital letters, emigrated with her family from Bulgaria to Switzerland due to the Soviet occupation. While in Geneva, she started her art education under Germaine Richier, a mentor whom she would subsequently follow to Paris, where she set up a studio. In 1950, she moved to Brazil to follow her parents, and started working on large-scale bronze sculptures, partly inspired by pre-Columbian iconography and its monumental geometric abstractions, in the attempt to distil a universal vocabulary of essentialised ancestral forms. The works borne from this inspiration appear to constantly undermine the liminal differentiation between flora and fauna, suggesting a symbiotic non-human original stage of being. Her sculptures evoke flying birds, animals, and insect shapes, all of which merge into the sinuosity and exuberance of plants, or more often, their bulbous roots. These biomorphic formations embrace hybridity as an archetypical belief in the indifferentiation of nature. Liuba s sculptures evoke an archaic quality in the liminal and unstable process of becoming. Her formal vocabulary developed a personal universe of creatures according to the artist emerging from her subconscious.

Text by Francesco Manacorda

The artist’s voice

In my sculptures, I attempted to represent movement rather than static forms. I am trying to express a transfiguration of the animal and plant worlds, and my personal expression is inspired by all kinds of natural forms.