Biography

Elena Peteva works in painting, drawing and multimedia drawing/film/projection. She exhibits in the US and internationally including: European Museum of Modern Art (Barcelona, Spain), Butler Institute of American Art (Ohio), Arnot Art Museum (New York), Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts (Florida), Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Indiana), Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Pennsylvania), and numerous contemporary art galleries. Her work is in many public and private art collections, including Princeton University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is the recipient numerous awards, including three Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants.

“My work is an allegorical representation of the human state, time and transience.
The outer is emblematic of the inner, whether the outer representation reveals my subject’s inner state or my subject acts as a personification of an idea. In the drawings and paintings I construct I seek a distilled representation, an impossible stillness that captures the ephemeral essence of “now”, the memory of the past (“before”) and the sense of what is to come (“after”) and creates a deeper and more truthful reality, in which our presence and absence exist simultaneously. I often think what I try to do in my work is to define, present and illuminate things that are perhaps unrepresentable.”