I am honoured to present my work at MEAM — Museu Europeu d’Art Modern in Barcelona, under my artistic name TEON.
For this presentation, I bring a new bronze sculpture incorporating an authentic ballet pointe shoe — continuing my exploration of memory, the body, absence and matter.
The pointe shoe once carried movement, discipline and physical presence. Removed from the body and transformed through bronze, it becomes something else: a trace. A memory held by matter.
TEON (Teodora Nikolova)
Bulgarian visual artist
Painting · Sculpture · Spatial Installation
📍 MEAM — Museu Europeu d’Art Modern
Barcelona, Spain
16–18 October 2026
Opening Reception: 16 October · 18:00–20:00
“I don’t paint what I see. I paint what remains.”
THE WEIGHT OF WHAT REMAINS
2026
Bronze, mirror and authentic ballet pointe shoe
40 × 12 × 30 cm
Unique piece, 1/1
What does matter hold after the body has given everything?
The Weight of What Remains explores the tension between physical absence and material memory.
A bronze human figure confronts a mirror — a surface that traditionally returns an image, but here becomes a threshold between presence and disappearance.
Embedded within the work is an authentic ballet pointe shoe: an object that has carried the weight, discipline and repetition of a real body.
The dancer is no longer present.
The object remains.
For TEON, the pointe shoe is not a decorative symbol. It is evidence — matter transformed by human presence. Together, bronze, mirror and the worn object create a dialogue between permanence and fragility, weight and movement, body and memory.
Presented at MEAM • Museu Europeu d’Art Modern, Barcelona, 16–18 October 2026, with ARTIO GALLERY.
TEON is the artistic identity of Bulgarian visual artist Teodora Nikolova. Her practice moves across painting, sculpture and installation, examining memory, the body and the traces that human presence leaves within matter.
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