→Niya Tsenkova

Biography

Niya Tsenkova (1999) is a multidisciplinary artist from Sofia, Bulgaria. After graduating from the Fine Arts bachelor programme at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2022), she developed a fluid practice that moves between painting, ceramics, metalwork, and site-specific installation. Building on the classical training she received at the National High School of Fine Arts "Ilia Petrov" in Sofia, Tsenkova has developed a visual language that brings together the organic qualities of clay and the contemporary aesthetics of metal constructions. Growing up in a family of conservators and church fresco painters, she was introduced to religious art through direct experience. From an early age, she spent time on scaffolding in churches, mixing pigments, painting ornaments, and assisting in the preservation of sacred imagery and architectural decoration. This ongoing engagement with restoration practices continues to inform both her material choices and conceptual approach. Intuitive processes, the use of negative space, and the assembly of separate elements into larger entities are central to her methodology. Her works often emerge through an experimental dialogue between materials, where fragmentation, balance, and spatial relationships become tools for constructing meaning. Drawing inspiration from icons, idols, relics, and religious art, Tsenkova investigates how visual languages are transmitted, preserved, and transformed over time. She is particularly interested in the circulation of images and symbols, and in the ways cultural heritage is continually reinterpreted within contemporary society. Rather than approaching historical forms as fixed artefacts, she considers them living structures whose meanings shift according to context, perception, and use. Through the encounter between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary artistic approaches, her practice explores the relationship between preservation and transformation, questioning how inherited aesthetic systems continue to shape collective memory and contemporary ways of seeing. By bringing together materials and forms associated with different temporalities, Tsenkova creates works that reflect on the persistence of cultural narratives and the evolving relevance of historical imagery in the present.