What remains when the image disintegrates? When form ceases to function as representation and becomes energy, perception, a trace of light, a tension between body and space?

After the Image presents sculpture as a state beyond visible completion. Here, the object is not a final result but a moment within a process — a temporary configuration of matter, electricity and perception. The light installation and neon function not as effects or decorations, but as carriers of structure. They construct, reshape and dematerialise the architecture, transforming the space into an active field.

In Yoana Tuzharova’s works, light traces boundaries that simultaneously build and dissolve volume. The neon line is at once drawing and construction — it creates contour without mass, form without weight. Sculpture does not simply stand in space; it activates and warms it. The viewer’s body becomes part of this process: movement alters perception, and perception completes the form.

In this sense, Tuzharova’s works can be read through the concept of “atmosphere” developed by Gernot Böhme, for whom space is perceived not merely as an architectural given, but as a sensory field built of light, materiality and bodily presence. For Böhme, atmosphere is an intermediate zone between object and viewer — something that belongs entirely neither to form nor to perception, but arises in their interaction.

It is precisely in this unstable zone that Tuzharova’s practice is situated: between architectural rigour, conceptual clarity and emotional vulnerability. Her interventions do not impose an image; they create the conditions for its emergence in the viewer’s mind. The light does not illuminate the sculpture — it is the sculpture itself.

The context of the gallery carries particular weight here. The legacy of Vaska Emanouilova, with her sense of sculptural concentration and inner energy, creates a tension between the solid and the ephemeral. If modern sculpture affirms mass as the carrier of meaning, After the Image proposes light as new flesh — electric, mutable, temporal.

Architecture here is not a backdrop but an active system. Corners, heights and empty volumes become resonators of light. The space begins to function as a membrane in which every vibration is physically sensed by the viewer. Sculpture takes place not before us, but around us.

After the Image does not signify the end of form, but its transformation. What remains after the image is the trace— a line, a pulsation, a glow. Within this trace, sculpture is released from the weight of mass and becomes an event: a temporary convergence of body, space, and light.

Curator: Reneta Georgie