opening: 14 October, Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.

The term Blue Mind describes that particular state of hushed attentiveness experienced in the presence of water. Among Andrey Yanev’s watercolours, it hardly needs explanation. Water, horizon, light and the transparency of colour draw the viewer into a different sense of time – a time of spreading and receding, of quiet inward movement.

The exhibition Blue Mind – States of Watercolour turns towards a natural realm within the artist’s visual world, one in which

the sensibility of someone born by the sea quietly surfaces.

In Yanev’s watercolours, the sea becomes a space in which seeing gradually turns into contemplation.

It is no coincidence, then, that the exhibition opens with works from the Portals series – works through which the noise of the city seems to subside and the narratives of everyday life to recede.

With this subtle shift in perception, the ‘blue mind’ begins to unfold through the slower rhythm of the main gallery, where

the pauses are filled with music.

There, Andrey Yanev’s voice fills the space much as pigment spreads across the watercolours he has created over the past three decades – dissolving, leaving a trace, at times almost disappearing.

In the most recent works, created in 2026, this thread continues, while the artist’s language seems freer still. He seeks to capture the elusive – through Reflections, perhaps Between Two Cypresses, by looking Somewhere Beyond, or entering into Conversations with Infinity – while Blue Mind – States of Watercolour creates a space for stillness at the very heart of the city’s swirling autumn life.

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Curator: Elisaveta Stantcheva
Exhibition design: Petar Mitev

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About the Artist

Andrey Yanev was born in 1965 in Burgas. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Kazanlak before graduating from the National Academy of Art in Sofia, where he specialised in mural painting under Prof. Mito Ganovski. He later specialised in artistic enamel in St Petersburg.
Moving between the monumental and the intimate, he has developed his own personal theory of the image. After dozens of solo exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad, the territory of his work remains consistently hushed – inhabited by silent presences, invisible traces and a sense of anticipation.
Over the years, Andrey Yanev has returned repeatedly to Mount Athos – to its monasteries, its paths and its candle-like cypresses, visibly reaching towards invisible realms. Perhaps it is from there, too, that the depth of his gaze towards water emerges. In his watercolours, the sea is stripped of narrative drama and distilled into a translucent, endlessly unfolding space. It stands as a testament to the discipline of contemplation and to the distinctive syncopation within the rhythm of matter, as shaped and articulated by the artist.