The exhibition is among the events featured in the Second Paper Art Biennial, held within the framework of the Sofia Paper Art Festival 2013. The biennial’s current edition, comprised of 19 exhibitions in various Sofia venues, has broad international representation.

The selection of artworks, exhibited under the “Messages of Light” motto, high-lights the specifics of paper art from the vantage point of various traditions and cultures around the world. With its fragile structure, which is a combination of primeness and exquisiteness, delicacy and playfulness, elegance and grotesqueness, mundaneness and magic, paper is a material affording artists countless opportunities for creative reconsideration of the world. Many of the artworks were developed as nature forms, others feature elements of script, folklore traditions, poetic confessions. This involved the use of various manual paper-casting technologies, as well as of recycled and scrap paper. The imagination and artistic freedom paper is approached with by artists transform the mundane everyday material into a delicate spiritual message.

The exhibition features 27 artworks by 13 artists: Harald Metzler - Austria, Eva Toker - Argentina, Gail Stiffe and Jassica Wong - Australia, Irene Rammensee and Helene Tschacher – Germany, Sun Young Kang - Korea, Veroniquies Sapin – France, Yoshio Hasegawa – Japan, Ferry Staverman – the Netherlands, Magda Sobon – Poland, Aidee Bernard – France and Kathrin Dardel – Switzerland.

Most of the artists participating in the exhibition are members of the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists (IAPMA). Many of them came to our country specifically for the festival and the presentations included in its programme. Helene Tschacher was a long-time president of the association, while annual paper art congresses help promote successfully new trends in this kind of art.

Two presentations will be delivered at the Sofia City Art Gallery-hosted exhibition: one devoted to recycled paper and its products, introducing new trends in the cre-ation of various constructions, and a lecture entitled “Paper in China” to be deliv-ered by Liu Ian Gracely, curator of international sculpture events.

ARENAS - A LIFE BETWEEN CINEMA, SMALL SCULPTURE AND PAINTING

09 May 2013 - 10 May 2013

The jubilee exhibition organized in SCAG traces precisely the essential directions of exploration and evolution in the artistic trajectory of Petko Bonchev.

The exposition brings forth a rich and diverse creative heritage that seems engaged in equal measures in cinematographic stage design, in small sculpture and in painting.
Having initially chosen architecture in 1952 Petko Bonchev graduates from the State School of Polytechnics in Sofia to be able two years only later to find a home in the world of cinema. He gets employed in the Boyana Feature Films Studio and his allegiance to this institution will last a lifetime. There he will work as Production Designer on such films as The Inspector and the Night (1963), A Bit of Heaven for Three (1965), Karambol (1966), Taste of Almonds (1967), The Prosecutor (1968), The White Room (1968), At Each Kilometer (1969 – 1971), Typhoons with Gentle Names (1979), I Don’t Live One Life Only (Nikolai Ghiaurov 50) (1981), Salvation (1984) and others. And while designing this roll of battle epics for the silver screen, Petko Bonchev will be methodically creating an intimately personal poetic realm of images – paintings and small sculptures.
This exquisite heritage of the artist, which he himself revealed in a few solo exhibitions before his death remains insufficiently explored and unfamiliar to the public. The present exhibition in the SCAG offers the opportunity to perceive Petko Bonchev from a specific point of view that by all evidence makes it possible to recognize in the small sculptures the symbiosis between production design and painting and the seamless fusion of expressive means that transform the movie frame into a painting and infuse the painting with the vitality of a cinema scene.

The exhibition includes works from the fund of the SCAG and private collections, as well as photographic testimonials from the Photographic Archive of the Bulgarian National Cinematheque.

The exposed photos are the work of: Irina Peeva, Donka Jolova, Lothe Mihailova, Krum Kostov, Jeni Vulova, Georgi Rusinov, Elena Dimitrova, Mladen Chavdarov, Krassimir Arabadjiev, Lena Hurtarska, Todor Kostov, Kornelia Antonova, Nikolai Gospodinov.

The Exhibition is created in partnership with the Bulgarian National Cinematheque, the National Film Center Executive Agency, the Artist Author Association, the Music Author Association.

Georgi Tenev. A MONUMENT OF MY MEMORY

06 May 2013 - 07 May 2013

Writer Georgi Tenev’s project “A Monument of My Memory” offers an archival and biographical reading of a specific historical fact and the way it is perceived today. It represents 200 photo reproductions of commemorative plaques with the names of Bulgarian soldiers and officers having died in the two Balkan Wars and World War One (1912-1913).

Through the years, the fate of these plaques has been unenviable. They were parts of a memorial which existed in the vicinity of what is today the National Palace of Culture. The monument with the roll of honour of Sofia’s 1st Infantry and Veliko Tarnovo’s 6th Infantry was damaged during the 1944 bombing raids and was completely removed in the 1970s during the construction of the Palace of Culture and the development of the surrounding area. The rolls of honour have been preserved in the repositories of the National Museum of Military History, but all attempts and initiatives over the past 20 years aimed at restoring the monument in one way or another have been unsuccessful.

The putting up of these photo reproductions coincides with the centenary of the wars in which Bulgarian soldiers and officers gave their lives, and with the 75th anniversary of the inauguration of the original Roll of Honour Memorial.

Georgi Tenev has implemented this project jointly with sculptors Natalia Todorova, Ivana Nencheva and Iliya Novachev, designer Gars, photographers Krassimir Stoichkov and Petar Yordanov and film director Lyubomir Pechev.

Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova

01 May 2013 - 12 May 2013

The video installation FRAMES includes 6 projections dedicated to various visual and social limitations. In three of her videos: The Inexorable Nature of the Renaissance, The Irresistible Charm of Impressionism and The Irrefutable Argument of Conceptualism (created in 2012–2013), the artist comments upon trends in visual art, namely Renaissance, Impressionism and Conceptualism, posing unambiguous questions about the potential liberties and limitations of each one of them. She adds to them the 2005 work Talk, which is actually a spontaneously recorded conversation between artists about some of the most prominent names in the history of painting.

A counterpoint to the above is the video Burden, where the artist tells a personal story from her childhood – the time when aesthetical preferences are shaped together with a system of views pertaining to one’s overall perception of the world.

In Elusive Images (2012), within the framework of five minutes and 45 seconds, Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova offers us her vision of the surrounding world, evidently shaped by all opportunities and limitations considered until that moment. Visual layering and the acquired social experience contribute to a multifaceted and well-rounded view. Hence the diverse “readings“ of the world, which resemble image layering in a video.

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Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova was born in 1960 in Sofia, where she works and lives. The artist is known for her ability to “capture“ and re-create the most delicate, frequently invisible, states of objects, people and human interrelations. Her ability to notice what others fail to see, to discern the nuances even in the most everyday situation and the most ordinary event places her among the most sensitive contemporary artists. Her more prominent solo exhibitions include: eco stories, Sklada+, Sofia, 2011; Globally and on a Long-term Basis the Situation Is Positive, Sofia City Art Gallery, 2009, Moderate Optimism, 6 September Street, No.9, Sofia, 2008; Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova, Centre for Contemporary Art, Pancevo, Serbia, 2008; The Lions of Sofia, Artists' Association fabs, Warsaw, Poland, 2006 and the Goethe Institute, Sofia, 2005; Vanitas, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan, 2004. She is the winner of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for 2009.