KRASSEN KRALEV
Krassen Kralev was born in Varna in 1967. He graduated from the Medical University in his hometown and later specialized in global marketing and political campaign management at the University of South Carolina (1990) and the Association of National Advertisers in the USA (1997). A long-standing expert in public communications, in 1992 he founded MAG Communications – one of the first advertising agencies in Bulgaria, internationally recognized with prestigious awards.
After an active professional and public career, Kralev returned to his first passion – painting. He began to draw as a child but interrupted this pursuit in the early 1990s. Since 2017, his artistic path has unfolded through solo exhibitions in Varna, Sofia, and Plovdiv, each of them supporting charitable causes.
Krassen Kralev’s painting transforms nature into a symbolic world, where seas, trees, villages, and human figures come to life in the rhythm of colour and light. His style is a synthesis of decorative expression and modernist abstraction within the context of postmodern art. Inspired by nature and the subconscious, the artist creates works that transcend reality, turning it into a living poetry of signs.
His style merges decorative expression and modernist abstraction, refracted through the freedom of postmodern thinking. His paintings transform reality into a symbolic world, where nature and the human figure become carriers of memory, emotion, and metaphor.
His works are owned by prestigious private collections in the country and abroad.
Selected Exhibitions
2017 – 1st solo exhibition, Finesse Gallery – Sofia
2022 – 2nd solo exhibition, Graffit Gallery – Varna
2022 – 3rd solo exhibition, Vejdi Gallery – Sofia
2022-2023 – 4th solo exhibition, Savov Art Club and Gallery – Plovdiv
2023 – Participation in the XXII International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Varna
2023 – 5th solo exhibition, The Residence Exclusive Club – Sofia
2024 – 6th solo exhibition, Nuance Gallery – Sofia
2025 – Upcoming 7th solo exhibition, Anel Museum-Gallery – Sofia
2025-2026 – 8th solo exhibition, Savov Art Club and Gallery – Plovdiv
2026 – Guest artist in the exhibition of Gallery 33 at the XXIII Salon of Arts, National Palace of Culture – Sofia
Vezhdi Rashidov, Sculptor
Everyone has their own window to look through it and to begin to see. And if we look at the art as emotionality that arises from impressions, images and colors, then in Krassen Kralev's paintings we can see the window through which he looks. What this window brings is the knowledge of the world, the colors of life, the variety that man wishes to reproduce, refracted through his own worldview and his own soul. I believe that the soul of my friend Krassen helpfully responded in his attitude to life, bursting with its colors and entering a world of creativity whose ways are always unknown.
Roads that bring the beauty and the palette of colors that make life beautiful. With these paintings, he discovers the path along which an emotional talent travels. This path is sometimes emotionally easy, sometimes – very difficult, but always leads to the most beautiful lie in life – the Art. This is one illusion of escape in the harsh times in which one can live.
Venceslav Antonov, Artist, President of The Union of Bulgarian Artists - Varna
In his paintings, Krassen Kralev treats the subjects with pronounced decorativeness, with an approach that is distinguished by expressiveness, in which a plastic organization is achieved with point, line, shape and color. With his paintings, the author builds on his visual and artistic culture. In his paintings, Krassen Kralev treats the subjects with pronounced decorativeness, with an approach that is distinguished by expressiveness, in which a plastic organization is achieved with point, line, shape and color. With his paintings, the author builds on his visual and artistic culture.
He began his professional creative career in Varna, in the field of advertising, spatial and graphic design. This is the field where his professional achievements are. The contribution of Krassen Kralev to shield his individuality in contemporary modern art, to guarantee his own approach, form and stylistic diversity, is indisputable. His personal choice helps to reflect the dynamics of various solutions, forms, symbols and images. Building one's own position guarantees personal initiative in the realization of the works.
The author's ability to grasp and create works provoked by the conscious and subconscious is influenced by symbols that appear in form and color, often as visions or unconscious telepathy. The eye and the brain are but one instrument by means of which sight enables the realization of spiritual feeling. Thus a piece of matter becomes capable of creating a work of art, according to the laws of beauty. The reality of this holds on to the artist's spiritual urge to convey an exquisite form of the image.
In the works of the author, the moment of movement, of the fleeting and the temporary, is emphasized in all the comprehensiveness of timelessness. Thought constructs emphasize the intellect and emotion of the plots. They become messages, with a claim to confirm the creator and his work, on the basis of lasting values. All this defines Krassen Kralev as a free artist who makes a personal contribution to his creativity in contemporary fine art.
Vezhdi Rashidov, Sculptor
Krassen Kralev is a rare phenomenon who, for years, standing in silence, carries the sensitivity of a person who loves creativity and devotes himself to it, who finds peace of his soul in the gentle sensitivity of color in the paintings he creates.
A person who carries within himself and belongs with the color that both mentally frees him and recharges him. An art interesting by itself and a kind of experimental - both for him and for Art Gallery Vejdi, whose main policy is to show established, big names in art, but also young talents and experimenters with restless souls like Krassen Kralev.
The path of everyone who carries the talent within themselves, regardless of when and how, like the genius work of a Gauguin, who began only at the age of forty, proves that talent lives in each of us, and when it will break through is a matter of time.
Krassen Kralev is an interesting artist whom I sincerely wish good luck in his experiments. This is the way.
Bozhidar Savov, Gallerist
There are many necessary qualities for a person to be a creator. Talent, inspiration and persistence are the most necessary. Krassen Kralev categorically owns all three. Most people know him as an athlete and a politician, and until recently did not suspect that he was also an artist. He is assisted by his experience in the field of advertising, spatial and graphic design, where he is an undisputed authority. It turned out that Krassen Kralev has been pouring out thoughts and emotions on the white canvas for a long time. I would say he does it extremely professionally. His works are modern and expressive, compositionally strong and rich in color. At first glance, they are decorative, but they burst with light and mood, thoughts and feelings. The static in his paintings is apparent, and looking into them, the viewer discovers the dynamics of geometric figures and symbols united in a compositional unity. The author has his own style and penmanship, built on a solid knowledge in the field of national and world art.
Krassen Kralev's exhibition at the Art club & gallery SAVOV is the fourth in his career as an artist. After Varna and Sofia, his works visited Plovdiv. His paintings are already well known to connoisseurs. They decorate homes and offices and are owned by private collectors and galleries from the country and abroad. I am possitive that the art of Krassen Kralev will meet its well-deserved admirers in Plovdiv as well.
Ljuben Dilov-son, Public figure
The blue inside
Whether it is because he is a man of the sea, whether it is because he has been rolling in the most intense surface waters of publicity all his life, but Krasen Kralev has developed an exceptional sense of depth, light and inner states of the material and immaterial "blue". He clearly lacked them in his life as an advertiser, politician, head of state and journalist. But that lack today has resulted in happily sharing his artistic pursuits with us. Krasen's aesthetics and painting technique cause an indescribable pleasure. I don't bother to define his painting by genre, some call it "abstract expressionism", but for me exactly in relation to his canvases, the definitions only demonstrate the impossibility of naming states that often lead to the "mystical". It's fascinating that different viewers - both specialists and collectors and ordinary onlookers like me - find our own Krasen. Pictures speaking only to him, in a certain language. For me, this is beyond doubt the rich states of the "blue", the blood and genetic memory of the three salty waters in which the soul feels best - sweat, tears and sea. The sadness of the deep, alongside the jubilant happiness of the surface glimpses. The play of shapes and colors that don't just complement each other, but seem to flow from each other. For a long time, such a bold, categorical and clear voice has not appeared in the Bulgarian artistic space. I am sure that Krasen's exciting journey in painting is just beginning and new exciting discoveries await us, but what has been done so far is respectable and his canvases justifiably adorn many offices, private homes and collections. His paintings are a reach into the "inner blue" of spirit and matter, a reach that has a literally therapeutic effect.
By acquiring a painting by Krasen Kralev, you are not buying a painting. You buy yourself depth, ease and healing happiness.
Krassen Kralev
I take the canvas, trying not to be intimidated by its whiteness, and begin to pour out my emotions, feelings, and inner world just as they are.
I believe that everyone should try to express themselves through art – whether through music, painting, or literature – it provides freedom, a way to 'burst out' rather than conforming to people's expectations. I, for instance, am inspired by colors rather than forms – I would never seek to create images and landscapes. That's why I search for colors – to prevent an 'implosion' within myself, I express the explosion on the canvas.
Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva, Art critic and art historian
Krassen Kralev’s painting is a quest through the visible and the invisible, through nature and the subconscious, through personal history and collective memory. In his works, the landscape is never just a view – it is a pulsating body where seas, trees, villages, and human figures come to life in the rhythm of colour and light. ‘Art has always managed to pierce through even the darkest of times’, he says. ‘It helps me preserve myself and keep the colourfulness and warmth of my thinking’.
Each cycle reveals a different aspect of this inner necessity. Seashores offers clear horizons disrupted by explosive cliffs of energy. Dancing Tree turns the forest into choreography of movement and light, while Forest emphasizes vertical monumentality. Mediterranean radiates southern luminosity, while Nightscapes transform darkness into inner music. In Imagined Nature and Warm Autumn, natural motifs are reshaped into signs, while Forgotten Settlements and Reborn Muses explore the archetypes of home and body – spaces of memory and inspiration.
Krassen Kralev‘s style can be defined as a synthesis between decorative expression and modernist abstraction, but inscribed within the broad horizon of postmodern art. He inherits the freedom of gesture and the intensity of colour from modernism, while abstract expressionism is palpable in the energy of texture and the organic network of colours. His ability to play with quotations and influences comes from postmodernism – a dialogue with David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, Genko Genkov, Nikolay Yanakiev, Svilen Blazhev, but also a conscious transformation of these languages into a clearly distinguishable personal style.
Thus, his art is both local and universal – rooted in the Bulgarian landscape and visual tradition, while resonating with the global aesthetics of the 21st century, where reality is refracted through symbols and nature is perceived as a system of signs. In this sense, Kralev’s painting belongs firmly to contemporary art: it does not aim at illusion but at interpretation, where nature and the human body are not objects but carriers of memory, metaphor, and emotion. Postmodernism gives him the freedom to turn influences into his own handwriting. Dialogue with the great names is only a beginning – the conclusion is always personal.
‘The greatest epiphany is found in art,’ the artist says. ‘There is no way to lie there – you are exactly as you are.’ It is this authenticity, combined with the postmodern freedom of style, that defines the specificity of his work today.