The map is the means of traveling for the dreamer who will never leave home and make his travels come true. It is a way to lose yourself or not to lose yourself, depending on your familiarity with the conditionality and its signs.

Maps are a brief literature category, too. They speak many languages, describing the places they show. They are the pictures of the earth redrawn by people, and urban pictures reflect the even more complex and sometimes weird image created by the necessity of man to ensure his comfort. There is everything in this exhibition - islands for the dreamers, cities for the urban people, historic maps for the nostalgic people, political maps for the dabblers in politics.

Viewers are in their own right to select the approach to this exhibition –treating them as geographic maps with the pleasure-provoking intellectual game of decoding them, or as abstractions loaded with the aesthetic beauty of the color and shape.

Prof. Ivan Gazdov COVER CLASSIC GRAPHICATURE

14 April 2005 - 11 May 2005

The COVER CLASSIC GRAPHICATURE COLLECTION (1999-2003) is the most recent series, featuring thirty artworks created by Professor Gazdov during the past several years. The graphicatures, familiar to connoisseurs, appear for the first time in shapes and technique unusual for them. In addition to serigraphic prints, they exist as vinyl ‘billboards’.

The cycle of graphicatures, not shown before, is directed towards the world’s history of art, which is turned into a subject of visual interpretations. The artist has put under operative analysis paintings by some of the world-famous painters ranging from the Renaissance to the Postimpressionism. All works are united by one common ideological strategy, but the original idea has gone through numerous directions of development in each artistic creation. World-famous artwork masterpieces by Brueghel, Rubens, Vermeer, Mane are recreated. The Professor Gazdov’s artistic intervention is not only visual but also a conceptual one. Familiar details are developed towards a direction never imagined before; they can be hidden in the white spots or they can completely disappear. Through his critical approach, the author reveals details that are only implied in the ‘original’ artwork or completely eliminates the ones infringing the logic of the interpretation. Thus, the graphicatures retell, further develop and create new content of the works emblematic for the history of art.

According to “Bulgarian Encyclopedia, A…Z”, published in 2002/2003 by the ‘Trud’ Publishing House, “graphicature” is “a definition of a visual idea with grotesque and artistic unexpectedness and a typical relationship between the black spots and the parts of the white background entering them, in a serigraphic technique; the author’s graphic style of I.Gazdov.

Prior to the present collection of graphicatures, the cycles ‘Play of silhouettes’, ‘Graphicatures-origami’, ‘Black touches’, ‘ Erotic graphicatures’ are created and shown in a sequence of exhibitions in Sofia, Plovdiv, Yambol, Gabrovo, Tryavna, Sozopol, Paris, Copenhagen, Toyama, Warsaw.

JAPAN PRINT ASSOCIATION IN SOFIA ART GALLERY

04 April 2005 - 08 May 2005

The Sofia Art Gallery exhibition features 49 artists, each one presented with two works. In this respect, this is the largest-scale presentation of contemporary Japanese graphic art.

Since the beginning of 2000, the contacts between Japanese and Bulgarian graphic artists have become more purposeful. The friendship and professional cooperation, between Professor Akira Kurosaki and Professor Roumen Skorchev, dating from 1981, have laid the basis of the project. With the participation of „Lessedra” Gallery and its director, Georgi Kolev, the exhibitions ‘Contemporary Graphic Art from Japan and Bulgaria’, (NFAG, 2001) and ‘Contemporary Bulgarian and Japanese Graphic Art’ (Kyoto and Japan, 2003) were presented.

The Japanese Graphic Art Association is the largest organization of this kind in Japan and an internationally renowned partner. It was founded in 1931. Nowadays, it has 187 artists-members and its associate members are 181. Along with the achievements of contemporary Japanese graphic art, its annual exhibitions offer participation to young talents, and the use of new techniques and expressive means is promoted and popularized.

Akira Kurosaki was born in 1937 in Manchuria, Talien. He graduated from the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto in 1962. Inspired by the Ukio-e style, he began creating woodcuts around 1967. In 1970, he received the award of the Ministry of Education from the Seventh International Graphic Art Biennale in Tokyo. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Japan and abroad and received awards in Florence, Seoul, Norway, Bharat, Cairo, Portland, Maastricht and more. In 1983 he received First Prize at the Second International Graphic Art Biennale in Varna.

He is a professor and Director of the Graphic Art Department at the Kyoto Seika University and a member of the Japanese Graphic Art Association. He is author of the books: “Contemporary woodcut”, “Woodcut”, “Work on paper”, “Graphic Art History”.

MEETING POINT Svetlin Balezdrov. "7"

04 April 2005 - 24 April 2005

My three-dimensional abstract work aims at influencing the subconscious and provoking contemplation, e.g to tune the spirit to those peculiar states, typical for the Eastern mysticism. The Asian thread in the project could also be traced in the treatment of the material. Each module of the ensemble is folded only by on single piece of paper without infringing its integrity. Despite my explicit interest towards the East, I belong to the cultural tradition of the West and I think that my work is seriously influenced by the constructivism and minimalism.

Svetlin Balezdrov