In 2011 the idea to create a new club for cultural initiatives in Veliko Tarnovo arose in a conversation between participants from the art group "Idea" and the gallery "Atelier". The club appeared to disappear shortly before the age of three.
The Hedgehog Club was one of the hidden places in which the flowers of the impulse to create grew green, the sun of freedom to experiment appeared. We got together to see the new exhibit, watch and discuss the selected movie. Poetic, fiction, Bulgarian and foreign books, comics were presented. The city woke up with festivals, we attended theater productions, performances, installations, recitals, we met with artists who came as if from an unfamiliar place of thought and imagination. We met people with whom the talk of an extraordinary artist or beloved author lasted for hours, became part of workshops, listened to music in the rain, concealed our ideas for art there. Now the hidden place has become a memory, an idyllic, shared and impactful memory.
The folk wisdom that the four friends had chosen for the club motto was: "The hedgehog - this bird is stubborn, don't you kick it, it doesn't fly off." In Tarnovo Public Forest the hedgehogs flew away and only the path to Samovodska Charshya that left us was left. back to memory.
Adriana Hristova is one of those hedgehogs who welcomed us to her club, who initiated exhibitions, readings and other events. Lived one year in Zagreb, Croatia and Bucharest, Romania. Graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Veliko Turnovo “St. St. Cyril and Methodius ", now she teaches drawing and drawing.
Painting for her is a comeback. In her illustrations the dream flight, the re-remembering of the incomprehensibly beautiful, of the truly childish are present as motives. She is also involved in mountaineering, traveling, and her love for nature overflows with what she creates. Thus, whether with watercolors, or with pastels, or according to the technique suggested by the very idea of the work, this love leads with it and fills the canvases with animals, birds, trees, flowers, clouds…
Adriana Christova also adds symbolic meaning to some of the images, places signs, gives way to a secret and magical vision of nature and man - and their common in the plan of the depicted world. Her illustrations point us not only to childhood and nature, but also to rethinking the urbanistic, far from the storm of everyday life, somewhere in the space above us, psychologically and physically, to the aura of sleep, to overgrowth and rediscovery, to that which we hide from ourselves.
Her first exhibition, A Hidden Place, took place at the end of 2012 at the Hedgehog Club. At the time, she was signing the RITSU illustrations. This exhibition is part of the memory. But there is no need to remember. These paintings and art, when it has its own power, remain in the present.
