Almanac is pleased to present Still No Masterplan, a solo show by Stefania Batoeva.

Contemplating the relationship between order and chaos, and the distribution of this balance, the exhibition sets up a promenade that takes an imprint of reality’s atmosphere.

In the process of removing bricks from the pavement, the air between the cracks is released. The movement calls for a chain of action that connects perspiring torsos and swirling molecules. A mingling of the organic takes place in the moment of mixing plaster and making marks.

The work starts from the material. In the process of tracing labour, of chasing function, movement becomes solid. Traces of effort and time are absorbed into the gesture of painting and spread across the breadth of the support. In the process of translating the imprints, in measuring the weight of the work, a bas-relief (that medium for proclaiming the glory of toil) juts out of the backdrop like a floating stain.

There is an impossibility of entering into a relationship with the layers of a work, of piercing the surface. Taking a subtle reading of all imperfections, the trace is established as a superficial violence and an ideal of beauty. The reclining nude of Matisse is folded in with the arbitrary ripples of space and time, set in gypsum and tar.

As the artworks converge without ever quite meeting, an oblique plane cuts through its reflections. An invisible line connecting the abstract and the figurative is cut loose, and what remains is the flattened space of weightless reclining.

Stefania Batoeva (Sofia, Bulgaria) is completing her MA in Scuplture at the Royal College of Art, and lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Koal Gallery, Berlin and group shows such as AUTO COUTURE, Automotive Couture, London; Biennale Online 2013; Scattered Showers – Forms of Weather, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt.

This exhibition forms a part of The Immaterial Almanac, a series of collaborative projects and solo exhibitions with emerging artists who have made performance and labour part of their practice in experimental ways.

Centred on the possibilities for resistance stemming from the increasingly flexible, fluid and invisible ways of working and producing, the project engages with immaterial labour’s influence on the way we interact, learn and create value.

The Immaterial Almanac is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.