About The Artist

Bulgarian artist Mariana Toneva (b. 1965) is best known for her bright colours, expressiveness and symbolic compositions. Working across painting and handicrafts, Mariana creates an enigmatic and instantly recognisable style that is strongly individual and can not be put in well-known categorisation. Mariana Toneva was born and is currently living in Plovdiv. So far she had solo exhibitions in Sofia, Plovdiv, Pazardzhik and Varna and she participated in various group exhibitions and festivals. The author had create a hundreds of paintings and most of them are part of private collections in Bulgaria and abroad. Embracing various materials and techniques, she is not trying to control or restrain her process of working but to emphasize the clarity of the message itself. Her works are like thresholds that tempt us to go to the other side. They are the gates, ideas and the material structure of an inner journey. Magical and enchanting, they lead to spiritual knowledge. They seduce and allude because the endpoint of a journey is as important as the road itself. Her art is known for its expressiveness and bold compositions generalizing in symbols the mystical knowledge. Encoded in our minds, it stimulates us to search and find it, to understand it, even by only intuition. This makes the author’s paintings intelligible, provoking and warm. The freedom to be herself turns her into a modern author, combining expressiveness and honesty. As she says – “Art’s meaning isn’t in what the artist creates, but in the fact that God creates through the artist.” Her art is a process and a purposeful inner search. website: www.toneva-art.com follow me on facebook: www.facebook.com/toneva.art