Daniel Dinev has no academic art education. The main reason is connected with stereotypes introduced into social practice during the years of communist rule — admission to art high schools and the academy through personal connections and family ties.
What is encouraging is that under these extremely unfavorable conditions the talented young man did not lose faith in his prospects as an artist. Instead, he struggled to overcome all the difficulties involved in mastering nature, color and composition. These efforts produced lasting results only after eight years of persistent work, toward the end of the 1980s. This means that his fully independent creative expression was concentrated within the limited span of about three and a half years.
During this period Dinev managed to offer the art market works that demonstrate not only increasingly confident professionalism but also an independent attitude toward stylistic and plastic problems. These range within a Surrealist outlook realized through both figurative and non-figurative means. Especially in recent years, the young artist has expanded his search toward global problems of human existence, as seen in works such as “Between Two Worlds”, “Breakthrough”, “The Blue Snare”, “Westward” and “Discovery II”. An important feature of his approach is the desire to express organic form as a natural manifestation of life. For this reason, the forms he uses have little in common with the geometric architecture of abstraction familiar since Kandinsky; instead they lead toward searches and problems associated with the aesthetics of André Masson. Referring to these names does not imply unresolved artistic influence, but rather an affinity with certain artistic principles of Surrealist aesthetics in our time.
A precise selection of the works Dinev could present in a solo exhibition would be capable of showing him at a very good creative level even before the most demanding clients. Such an appearance could have every prospect of success.
I warmly recommend the young artist!
Maximilian Kirov
Art historian, Candidate of Art Studies, Senior Research Associate
08.12.1990