From Two Perspectives exhibition of the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art (Jagodina, Serbia) presents certain top achievements in the field of marginal art. The items selected for this purpose were 65 works by two prominent artists from Bulgaria and Serbia, namely Predrag Milićević (Barbarian) and Rosen Rashev (Roshpak).

The cross-points between the two artistic visions resulting from different traditions and environment – as well as their different sense of colour and composition – reflect a wide range of quality artistic achievements which have highly contributed to the development of marginal art on the European scale. Both the similarities and differences between these two artists only strengthen their individual multi-layer vision and rich expressiveness.

Curator of the exhibition: Nina Krstić.

Naïve and marginal art has become a unique aspect of modern art developments in Serbia owing to the Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art. The Museum is specialised in selection, preservation, study and exhibition of published works of art, mainly of the Serbian and the formerly Yugoslavian art, and, after 1994 – also foreign marginal art.

The Jagodina Museum of Naïve Art was founded in 1960, i.e. at the time when naïve art was in full bloom throughout the world. Today, the Museum operates as a documentary centre of naive and marginal art with an international collection of over 2500 works, and implements some significant projects. The museum has organised more than 400 individual and group exhibitions both in Serbia and abroad as well as a Biennial of Naïve and Marginal Art and a large open air exhibition.

The Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art has contributed artistic works from its collection to numerous famous exhibitions in Paris, London, Melbourne, Vienna, Prague, Bratislava, Bucharest and various venues in Netherlands, Hungary, Greece, Russia, Belarus, Italy etc.

The museum is chaired by art historian Nina Krstić.

In 2007, the Sofia City Art Gallery hosted a retrospective exhibition from the Museum featuring works by artists from all generations with different artistic endeavours in naive and marginal art.

Kiril Prashkov. Poetry All Around Curator Daniela Radeva

09 March 2011 - 03 April 2011

The exhibition of Kiril Prashkov “Poetry All Around” is part of the long-term policy of the Sofia City Art Gallery to present one-artist shows of the most active contemporary art practitioners each year. These are artists whose work is influencing the development of the Bulgarian art scene in general. The invitation to showcase the works of Kiril Prashkov was extended because of the ability of this artist to propose theoretical problems in the form of artistic works where the relations between the means of expression and the material, the imagery, the quotation references and the metaphors are always legitimated by the initial idea. Many of his works are motivated by the drive to illuminate notions and concepts such as modernity, contemporaneity and classics that are the target for commentaries and debate within the practice of contemporary art.

Since the end of the 1980ies the artist has been experimenting with comparisons between the value of the “idea” and the “making” of an artwork. His artistic analysis is occasionally related to Western modernism(s) or the transformations of art at the end of the 20th century in Bulgaria; they are just as often related to the realm of politics, history and theory of art.

The exhibition includes works from various periods such as “Wire” (1989), “Hommage a Pouchkine” (1999) and “Natural Modernism” (2004). However, while being a survey of the artist’s career it is not a retrospective as such. The exhibition includes a number of new works that were created especially for this occasion and will be shown in public for the first time ever.

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Kiril Prashkov (b. 1956) graduated the National Art Academy, Sofia, the Department for Graphic Design and Illustration. Between 1984 and 1989 he works for the Kultura Weekly. In 1991-1992 he is the Chairman of the Club of the (eternally) Young Artist. He has realized many projects in the field of the printed media. He is a founding Member of the Institute of Contemporary Art-Sofia. Some of his one-artist exhibitions are “Watch Your Step” (SIBank Gallery, Sofia, 2007), “Responsible Painting” (The French Cultural Institute, Sofia, 2006), “Quotations” (Moscow Museum for Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2005), “Drawing as a Craft” (ATA Center / Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, 2003); as well as shows in the Spaces Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio, USA; the “The Oh God, No/O Yeah” Book and other Books and Vegetables” (Gallery of KulturKontakt, Vienna, 1995); the “Gruezi”, in Scuol-Nairs, Switzerland (1993).

The Other Eye Project OUT OF TIME Curator BOYAN MANCHEV

01 March 2011 - 03 April 2011

“The Other Eye” is a series of exhibitions, where non-art historians and non-curators are invited to work with the Sofia City Art Gallery museum collection. The project aims to look beyond traditional interpretations of history and, possibly, “unearth” somewhat forgotten works, and also trace new links connecting the latter.

After artist Luchezar Boyadjiev, the Sofia City Art Gallery invited philosopher Boyan Manchev. He chose to name his exhibition “Out of Time” based on the conclusion that, contrary to his expectations, big tales from history, ideological canons, and the representation of monumental historical events are far from constituting either a large part of the collection, or its structurally defining center. Rather on the contrary – the representation of various aspects of people’s private world obviously prevails, there being, conditionally speaking, an “idyllic” thread running through the works, which unifies all those aspects through the representation of elements of everyday living, which are not directly related to either big moments in history and monumental events, or to essential existential and metaphysical issues such as life, death, birth, violence, suffering, etc.

Time seems to be the central issue in the empirical conclusions stated above: it is the possible organizing principle serving as the basis of the thematic nuclei described above. The said principle appears to be particularly productive for three reasons at the least: the issue of time is considered in view of the “ontology of the present”, and does therefore constitute the focus of a great number of political, economic and philosophical debates; time is also the meta-notion of the museum and the archive in general, and of the SCAG collection in particular. In other words, concentration on the issue of time would allow us to view the whole collection through the prism of the exhibition (which is one of the aims of this project); last, but not least, time is the most enigmatic object of painting – how is time represented in painting, how does it become the object and possibly the subject of representation? The curator hypothesizes that a specific notion of time, and a specific experience of it determines the very structure of interpretation of specific issues and the approaches to their modulation.

Why then out of time? How is time featured in painting – not historical, event-and-fact-laden, symbolically organized and ideologically oriented time, but time itself (the time of life and of the world) without any of its “surplus values”? The “idyllic” or pseudo-idyllic imagery, which attracts the curator’s interest, carries a specific image of time or experience thereof. Action and the passing of time related to it seem to have frozen in the idyll of the moment. It is this empty, indefinite, nobody’s, out of time, that Boyan Manchev is interested in.

Artists whose works have been featured in the exhibition include: Vera Nedkova, Vera Loukova, Lika Yanko, Sami Bidjerano-Sabin, Kiril Tsonev, Iliya Petrov, Naoum Hadjimladenov, Ivan Nenov, Bencho Obreshkov, Dechko Ouzounov, Georgi Bawev, Nadezhda Kouteva, Nikolai Maistorov, Vihroni Popnedelev, Edmond Demirdjian, Samouil (Suli) Seferov, Dimiter Voinov, Dariya Vassilyanska, Nadezhda Deleva, Andrei Daniel, Zina Yourdanova, Luben Kostov, Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova, Milko Pavlov, Sasho Stoitzov, Nina Kovacheva, Ivan Moudov, Boryana Rossa, Nikola Mihov, etc.