DUMISANI KARAMANSKI
PRIMADONNA DWARF
Opening reception:
Friday 11 September 18.00 – 21.00
Photos by Adrian Escu
In PRIMADONNA DWARF, Dumisani Karamanski brings autobiography and fantasy into a world in constant transformation. Human figures appear among hybrid creatures, skeletal forms and luminous pools of colour, while bodies merge with their surroundings or seem to mutate from one state into another.
Karamanski’s paintings draw on personal relationships and lived experience. In the exhibited works, figures appear alongside plants, insects and skeletal forms, while bodies and faces are often partially obscured or merged with their surroundings.
The paintings reinforce this sense of flux. Saturated colour, abrupt changes of scale and perspective, loosely rendered figures and densely worked surfaces create spaces that resist a single, coherent reading. Acid greens emerge against dark blues and blacks; passages of spray paint sit beside gestural oil painting; figuration repeatedly approaches abstraction before returning again. Humour, desire, discomfort and vulnerability remain closely entangled.
The title PRIMADONNA DWARF brings many of these contradictions together. Grandiose and self-deprecating at once, it treats visibility as something to be performed rather than passively endured. Karamanski does not attempt to stabilise the identities or bodies that populate his paintings. Instead, he turns instability itself into a form of authorship, constructing a world in which the personal can become monstrous, comic, seductive and fantastical all at once.
Dumisani Karamanski (b. 1995, Weimar, Germany) lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria. He graduated from the National Academy of Art in Sofia with a BFA in Painting in 2019 and an MFA in Painting in 2021.
Recent solo exhibitions include Preparation for Something New! at UniCredit Studio, Sofia (2024) and Mausoleum of a Mama’s Boy at Credo Bonum Gallery, Sofia (2023). In 2023, Karamanski received the Visual Arts Award of the Stoyan Kambarev Foundation, and in 2026 he received the Painting Award of the Union of Bulgarian Artists.
Oil and alkyd spray paint on canvas
213 × 305 cm
Oil and alkyd spray paint on canvas
213 × 305 cm
Oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas
213 × 226 cm
Oil and alkyd spray paint on canvas
212 × 302 cm
Oil and alkyd spray paint on canvas
212 × 302 cm
Oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas
165 × 192 cm
Diptych
• Acrylic ink on canvas
40 × 30 cm
• Acrylic paint on paper
14.8 × 10.5 cm
Diptych
• Acrylic ink on canvas
40 × 30 cm
• Acrylic paint on paper
14.8 × 10.5 cm
Diptych
• Acrylic ink on canvas
30 × 40 cm
• Acrylic paint on paper
14.8 × 10.5 cm