Houben R.T.

Houben Tcherkelov, (Bulgarian: Хубен Черкелов; known as Houben R.T.; born January 23, 1970) is a Bulgarian painter and experimental artist who lives and works in New York. In his early photographs, film, and installations post-communist Bulgaria and Bulgarian art is a recurrent theme. In his more recent work, Tcherkelov paints images from American and other national currencies using impasto, glaze, and watercolor techniques. In all of his work the artist seeks to suggest the way in which symbolic images legitimize national power.

Life and Work

Houben Tcherkelov was born on January 23, 1970, in Kardzhali, a town in southeastern Bulgaria. Tcherkelov studied painting at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, and was associated with the radical movement around the XXL Gallery. During this time, Bulgaria witnessed the break up of the Soviet Union and its own totalitarian regime. Still, art critic Eleanor Heartney notes that studies in Sofia under a post-communist government “held that certain western styles, among them surrealism, abstraction, pop art, and photorealism, were products of the imperial west.” Artists, she continues, “were restricted to politically correct styles, including realism, impressionism, and, oddly, symbolism.” In this, Tcherkelov, like Leipzig-based artist Neo Rauch, "deliberately courts non-authenticity." While receiving classical training in painting, then, Tcherkelov nonetheless worked at the same time in an environment in which “social and philosophical questioning was a way of life.” This legacy has had a profound effect on the artist’s interrogation of the way that style can serve propaganda.

File:Washington Crossing the Delaware.jpg

Washington Crossing the Delaware. Quarter from New Jersey. 2007. 59 x 102 inches.

Tcherkelov’s early works in Sofia analyze space and life structures in a society transitioning at once to a new social system and acclimating to the rapid pace of globalization. Freezing, a 1994 exhibit of frozen animals in Sofia’s National Museum of Natural History (Bulgaria) pointed to the moribund state of museums in Bulgaria, grossly out-of-sync with the normal pace of events. In the same year the artist experimented with forms of life in works such as Adaptation – Utopia 2, in which he appended gills to his own body. Action Paint, an installation at M6 in Riga, tested the behavior of white mice as they ate, defecated, and walked through colored solution on canvas. The installation was exhibited alongside canvases completed by the mice, as well as the artist’s log of the project. This installation, along with Home (1997), a manipulation of makeshift human homes, was highlighted in Siksi’s 1997 New Europe issue. Tcherkelov was selected as one of eight artists to be featured in this issue.

Perhaps Tcherkelov’s most well-known work from his series of interventions is Suitable Suit, a video still from which served as the cover of Menschenbilder: Foto- und Videokunst aus Bulgarien. In this video the artist lumbers through a field in a suit many sizes too large. Tcherkelov’s analysis of Bulgarian society culminated in Reality Show (1998), a video that, with numerous art historical references, satirizes the affluence and decadence of the international film and music industry transferred to Sofia.

In 1995, Tcherkelov studied impasto painting with Jorg Immendorff in Amsterdam with a grant from the Felix Meritis Foundation. Not until he arrived in New York City in 2000, however, did he begin to work exclusively using this technique. Tcherkelov, initially struck by the use of classical imagery on American coins and banknotes, has explored the use these images play in legitimizing power through his painting. Heartney, in an introduction to Tcherkelov’s series of impasto paintings based on these images, writes that they present “symbols mined from American currency as keys to understand national dreams and fantasies.” Concentrating on details in both new and old currency, Tcherkelov “exhumes their meanings and contradictions, revealing the subliminal power that currency images have.” These works debuted at the Elizabeth Foundation in New York City in 2005.

Influenced by the work of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, both impasto painters, Tcherkelov’s depiction of images from currency differs from that of his predecessors not only in theme but in color: the artist, whose palette includes glitter, remarks that “I’m not using a projector or tracing to translate the banknotes; I’m painting them in a very vivid, expressive way.” Tcherkelov has likened his colorful work to miniature Byzantine mosaics of the 13th and 14th centuries, pointing to the influence of Byzantine culture on Bulgarian art. The relief created by impasto technique allows the painter to manipulate the way that light affects his work, and the peaks and ridges of the oil paint may suggest Tcherkelov’s own mountainous hometown. Painting both figurative and abstract forms, the artist has said of his work that “looking is rewarded when the viewer discovers that the figures might be composed of hills and valleys and streams.” Furthermore, “the emphasis on craft and paint, materiality and volume, makes these paintings conceptual.”