Rollicking Whirlwind 1975

Vangel Naumovski made this psychedelic scene, Rollicking Whirlwind, using paint, at an unknown date. The surfaces are flat and matte, laid down in even, almost airbrushed layers. Naumovski’s world emerges with a deep dark ground, from which these colorful biomorphic shapes float to the surface. This tension between depth and flatness is really interesting, as is the way he juxtaposes abstraction and figuration. Take the large blue shape in the upper part of the painting, it looks like a hovering vessel of some kind, and you can see the artist has added a few little details like a string of pearls to give it a sense of weightlessness. Then your eye drifts downwards towards the landscape below, filled with bulbous forms, and you begin to wonder, what kind of world is this? Naumovski, like Hilma af Klint, made work that had links to the visionary and the spiritual, with a similar interest in the hidden dimensions of reality. Just as in her work, this invites us to look beyond the surface and imagine new ways of seeing.