Абстрактното изкуство на Борис Елисеев
Boris Eliseev’s Abstract Art

Summary/Abstract: Boris Eliseev (1901–1978), a Bulgarian artist born in Kyustendil, who graduated from the Academy of Art, Sofia in 1925 in the classes of Prof. Nikola Marinov and Prof. Nikola Ganushev, moved to the US in 1937, where he lived until his death. Initially, he started working as a draughtsman for different industries and then, in the 1960s started up together with his wife a packaging design studio, Elysee, for leading cosmetics companies. Over the decade of work at the studio, he never stopped painting. He maid a number of pencil portraits, landscape watercolours, still lives and monotypes; in 1950 his interest in creative experiments increased and he started making abstract art. In 1977, the Union of Bulgarian Artists held his solo exhibition in Sofia featuring his abstract artworks alongside his popular portraits, still lives and landscapes of the 1930s. Motifs of Bulgarian popular tradition were more often than not a starting point in his quests, the colour was borrowed from that of nature, of the traditional costumes and fabrics of his native region of Kyustendil. Using action painting, through complicated and gradual work on the canvas, while retaining his fine flair for colour and composition, Boris Eliseev made Mother’s Rugs using acrylic on paper, searching for rhythm, texture, harmony. An individual position in-between cosmopolitism and the periphery of art in the second half of the twentieth century is evidenced by his career in the US, raising question about the fine and applied dimensions to art and allowing for some access to the complicated existence of an alienated personality.

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