In brief
From November 3‑21, Sofia’s Serdica Gallery displays Valka Parusheva’s 26 textile abstracts titled "Layers," which use micro‑threads to form pixelated designs that coalesce into translucent color fields. The artist, a member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists, aims to evoke human consciousness and emotion through minimalism and geometric complexity.
From 3 to 21 November 2026 the Serdica Gallery in Sofia opens its second floor to a new collection titled Layers, showing 26 textile‑based abstract works by Valka Parusheva.
Parusheva’s pieces combine a specific textile fabric with micro‑threads that, when examined up close, resemble individual pixels. From farther away the threads merge into soft, translucent color fields that shift and blend in subtle ways.
Parusheva says the exhibition is meant to illustrate how layers accumulate in the mind, influencing how people perceive the world.
I would like this exhibition to convey a sense of warm human presence and offer a purely aesthetic experience.
—Valka Parusheva, artist
Born in 1969 in the southeastern Bulgarian town of Sliven, Parusheva studied artistic textiles at the Dimitar Dobrovich School of Applied Arts, graduating in 1988. She works across contemporary art, textiles and graphic design, and is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists.
Parusheva’s career has included seven solo shows and participation in national group exhibitions since 1991. In 2026 she received the Union of Bulgarian Artists award in the textile art section of the Grass and Water National Exhibition, and earlier that year she earned an accolade at the Dissonances National Exhibition. She also won the award for unconventional forms at the Sirak Skitnik National Exhibition in 2024 and was recognized as an artist from the host city of Sliven at the same exhibition in 2018.
She spent 2016 at a residency in Paris’s Cité internationale des arts, a period that informed her use of complex layering in her recent work.
Parusheva’s works belong to the Union of Bulgarian Artists collection, and to galleries in Sliven, Yambol and Ruse. Private collectors in Bulgaria and abroad also hold pieces from her body of work.
As visitors walk through the gallery, they experience the interplay of micro‑thread pixels and the emergent color fields, a visual exploration of how the accumulation of layers mirrors the organization of consciousness and emotion.
“The goal is to blend minimalism with a figurative sense of composition,” Parusheva explains. “The layering process creates an abstract narrative that speaks to the viewer’s inner experiences.”
For Sofia’s art community, the exhibition reiterates the city’s commitment to contemporary textile arts and invites viewers to consider the subtle ways perception is layered, both visually and psychologically.
