Nicolas Manev bio

Nicolas  Manev was born in 1940, the 28 of August in TCHIRPAN – BULGARIA, in the depth of the THRACE’S plan.

He spent the main port of his childhood in TCHIRPAN and kept still attached to this beautiful and violent earth, homeland of the poet YAVOROV to whom he dedicated a great admiration.

After some artistic studies at School of Fine Arts of Sofia, close by his teacher the Professor Vasil Stoilov, he came in 1962 at the National School of Fine Arts of Paris in the studio’s Maurice Brianchon. He got his diploma and the Chanevard medal. After a long stay in the City of Arts in Paris, he began a serie of great trips in order to look for some natural phenomenons but also some cities loaded of stones and history: Venise, New York, Sienne, Senlis, Varna, Veliko Ternovo.

Nevertheless, Paris remains his home port, the place where he returns to exhibit the result of each studious journey.

From the studio in the “L’Isle Saint Louis” to the one of the “Porte de Bagnolet”, near the square Edith Piaf, what a lot of covered roads in an exacting search of a creation more personal and deep.

But it’s on the Black Seaside that he loves to come in the huge white house that he built on the hill over the sea, near to Volkan, where he painted some of his most beautiful boards: the friendship of the carver Stoimen Stoilov and his childhood memories, attracted him to Varna.

Since 1989, he is working steadily with the Gallery Lehalle, as the leader of the group of the Bulgarian artists of Paris, in the bosom of the pictural movement “Identite 2000” in which he is one of the essential element.

In 1994, he organized an international painting festival, for the Yavorov Foundation, where he invited some artist from France, Portugal, Canada, China, Japan and North Africa.

Deeply marked by the landscapes, cultural and artistical traditions of his native land, his work also testifies, his love for the large spaces that he discovered during his numerous trips throughout the world, searching some secret forms and structures in nature. This search led him from dunes of the North Sea to shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Seas passing by the wild sweeps of the Sahara and large plains of the Colorado. Each journey gave birth to drawings, oil paintings and watercolors which bear the stamp of his feelings and enthusiasms, as testimonies of his various pictural periods.

He created a very personal language which led him to redefine the domains of the abstract and figurative, where his relation to French and Bulgarian cultures gives to his vocabulary a special accent.

His drawings, oil paintings and watercolors, gave birth to various tapestries, lithographies and sculptures.

Pascale Courbot – Lehalle