Before days break
Stefania Batoeva
Opens April302026

Company Gallery is pleased to present Before days break, Stefania Batoeva’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from April 30 through June 6, 2026. Across Batoeva's practice, there is a tension between disintegration and reconstruction. Her paintings insist on the presence of love, care, and engagement with the other, even as the self gets pulled apart, collapses, and disappears. The work pushes back against its own erasure. It takes what threatens to undo, and uses those same conditions to define the contours of the subject.

In Batoeva's paintings, figures don't hold. They loosen, slip into context, and surface, hovering somewhere halfway in abstraction. In fact, they don't quite arrive as figures at all. Closer to persona than to form, they remain unstable, elusive, and ever-evolving. Batoeva's figures are shapeshifters, changing the story and reassembling themselves as they move through dense, atmospheric fields. They leave behind only partial phrases.

The artist's looping and string-like lines introduce a sense of connectivity and rupture simultaneously. This painterly attitude suggests the demarcation of invisible structures that link parallel realities and hint at alternative timelines: a method that tells of unseen forces, stored in the act of layering. The paintings unfold like speculative fictions, where multiple worlds exist at once and the boundaries between them remain porous. Acid skies of green and peach pour through veils of gray to conjure worlds that feel both dystopian and unexpectedly tender.

Within these fluctuating environments, Batoeva constructs a visual language of symbols. A "perfect" coat, a pair of heels, a shadow of dark hair. These motifs function as vessels of meaning, accumulating emotional and psychological energy across the works. In a time of turbulence, it is precisely these personal details that carry the greatest weight. They imply not only subjective histories but also broader systems of care, considering what we keep close and what ultimately defines us, particularly amid uncertainty.

Movement, both physical and mental, runs through the exhibition. In a series of works evoking timeless train voyages across the East, looking outward becomes indistinguishable from looking inward. Elsewhere, architectural forms, geometric structures, and fractured cityscapes illustrate a metropolis in flux, continually breaking apart and reassembling itself, insisting on its epic presence. References to pop-culture, fashion, art history, and cinema weave through autobiography and fiction. In one work, Batoeva appears as a painter observing a muse, a self-referential gesture tinged with irony.

At the center of the exhibition, a spatial intervention lures for a pause: a king-sized bed complete with pillows and bed linens is positioned against a dividing wall below one of Batoeva's paintings. To be here, not quite outside the image and not fully inside it either, the viewer gets caught in a cycle of looking that turns back on itself. The space quiets and folds into the covers, becoming less of a room and more of a state of being. Between waking and dreaming, the installation reads like a soft break in the tempo, an opening into one of Batoeva's parallel worlds. It makes room for rest and vulnerability, if only briefly, against a world that won’t.

Stefania Batoeva’s (b. 1981, Sofia, Bulgaria) recent exhibitions include Promises, promises, Duarte Sequeira Gallery, Braga, Portugal (2024); Divorce, Public Gallery, London, UK (2022); DRAMA, Import/Export Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, collaboration with SAGG NAPOLI (2021) Something to me, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Le Coeur Encore, The Approach Gallery, London, UK (2021); and Marc Chagall, All Welcome, London, UK (2019). Batoeva has taught Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK since 2017. Prior to this, she studied sculpture at The Royal College of Art, London, UK (2014) and Architecture at the Architectural Association, London, UK (2007). She currently lives and works in Paris, France.