(Midday Shadow
About Exhibition
Horror does not hide in the twilight—it sprouts from within ourselves under the blinding light of noon.
When the sun is at its zenith, shadows become their blackest and densest. It is then that the repressed breaks free. The protagonists do not fight monsters at night—they meet their own shadow (in the Jungian sense) face to face. Monsters grow from silhouettes on the grass, are reflected in ponds, and hide in the crowns of trees. This is a struggle through realization.
The literary foundation is Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (psychology where characters become monsters under the light of truth) and a “mundane” Lovecraft (a neighbor with fingers that are too long, a child’s shadow that lives independently). The aesthetics of Japanese kaidan—yūrei spirits in a sunny garden and the image of Katawa-guruma, reimagined as a curse that triggers exactly at noon.
Visual language—harsh lighting without half-tones, where every object casts a void-black shadow that often lives a life of its own. A joyful, almost “childlike” palette (golden, cinnabar, azure, pink) clashes with “sickly” spots of color.
Artist: Stefan Stoikov
Project Curators: Anastasiia Munich, Danylo Shirinskyi
Participants
Stefan Stoikov is a Ukrainian artist, was born in 1997 in Izmail, Odesa region. In his practice, the artist turns to images from various historical epochs, reinterpreting them through a contemporary context. Combining mythological motifs, cultural allusions, and visual elements of mass culture, Stefan creates multilayered compositions in which classical subjects coexist with modern forms of perception. The artist’s main themes are mythology, historical memory, cultural allusions, human solitude, and the interaction between classical art and contemporary visual culture.
