Sofia City Art Gallery and Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia together with: Foundation for a Civil Society, New York and Young Visual Artists Awards present Exhibition of the BAZA Award for contemporary art nominees.

The BAZA award for contemporary art is a part of the competition network Young Visual Artists Awards (yvaa.net), held yearly in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Kosovo, Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. The connection between the separate competitions is established by the Foundation for a Civil Society in New York, which provides the awards – a six-week creative residency in New York for one artist from each country. Each of the national competitions has its own name, schedule and managing art institution. Author of the name BAZA and initiator of the award itself is Maria Vassileva. The Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia (ica-sofia.org) is responsible for the realization of the competition and organizes it together with the Sofia City Art Gallery.

The award winner’s stay in New York comprises becoming acquainted with the art scene and art life, meetings with curators and colleagues. The artists have working studios at their disposal as well as the opportunity to organize an exhibition in the space of the International Studio and Curatorial Program (iscp-nyc.org).
The BAZA award winners so far are: Rada Boukova (2008), Samuil Stoyanov (2009), Anton Terziev (2010), Vikenti Komitski (2011) and Leda Ekimova (2012).

The selection of the award winner is made by jury of well-established painters, curators and representatives of art institutions. In 2013 members of the jury are: Maria Vassileva (curator, chief curator of the Sofia City Art Gallery), Iara Boubnova (curator, director of ICA-Sofia), Nedko Solakov (artist), Boris Missirkov (photographer), Georgi Bogdanov (photographer), Olivier Boissiere (contemporary art collector), Sara Reisman (curator, Vilcek Foundation Fellow). Besides joining the jury for the second stage of the competition, the visit of Sara Reisman aims for becoming acquainted with the modern Bulgarian art scene.

In the upcoming exhibition the eight 2013 nominees will present predominantly new projects. For Zoran Georgiev and Kiril Kuzmanov this is the second nomination for the BAZA award. Their works of art as well as the ones of Iskra Blagoeva, Stela Vasileva, Nikolay Zanev, and Dimitar Solakov are already popular with the public. Emilian Lalev and Sasho Popovski exhibit for the first time. Within the exhibition the authors will display objects, installations, paintings, drawings and video.

The BAZA award winner for 2013 is Kiril Kuzmanov.

Zlatyu Bpyadjiev and Baratsite

13 June 2013 - 01 July 2013

Zlatyu Boyadjiev and Baratsite is an exhibition organized by Sofia City Art Gallery and Art Gallery - Plovdiv. It consists of two parts - the first one includes iconic works by Zlatyu Boyadjiev from different periods, and the second is dedicated to his friendship with Vassil Barakov and David Peretz - the three known as Baratsite, tracking their common path in arts, as well as the personal development of each of them.

Zlatyu Boyadjiev will draw hundreds of compositions, portraits and landscapes in his creative life, marked by a watershed - the paralysis that determined his biography as an artist. So his work is divided into two periods. The first is characterized by the classic manner of composition, and in the picturesque building up is felt the influence of the Impressionists, of Renaissance masters and old icons, but the themes are always bound by Bulgarian nature, the small town and the village, with life in them. In the second period, when he began painting with his left hand, the style of the artist changed dramatically in the direction of imagery, including dozens of figures in the compositions and colours and expressive brushstrokes. His works acquired pronounced expressiveness and dramaticism. Some of them attract with their enjoyable story, while others are filled with bizarre characters, often as a disguise of symbolic meaning.

Fate made the three future artists meet in Plovdiv, where they had their first steps in art. That road started from drawing in the ruins of Kurshum Khan tavern, from the sign drawing company, the Academy of Arts, and their common lodging in Sofia, to take them out on the trails of the Rhodope mountains. Barakov, Boyadjiev and Peretz discovered their artistic means in this soft and beautiful mountain that attracted them
for years. And while the generation of Bulgarian landscape artists before them found beauty in old houses, their yards and alleys, it was Baratsite who discovered the Rhodope mountains for Bulgarian art as a plastic and sign image. The landscape in

the works of Boyadjiev, Barakov and Peretz is not just a beautiful view, but a specific creative attitude and mindset, depending on the purely subjective standpoint and feeling of the author.
Massive arrays, deep valleys, Rhodope style houses, curved paths, people and animals that inhabit them - they all possess the integrity and the forms that excited the three artists. They were attracted by the power of the mountain, its primary materiality, by the animate and the inanimate in it. The three artists, slowly over the decades, will walk their path from the Rhodope landscapes, through still lifes, figure compositions and portraits.
Peretz will create amazing landscapes and still life, turning them into high art. Over the years, he will go through figure composition with the means of synthetic expressive realism, reaching lyrical abstraction and progressively destructuring the image.
Barakov will be creative in still-life and portraits, but in all his works his preference will remain for the landscape genre. The artist’s early landscapes were expressive, with marked relief, saturated colour and dense texture, without minor details, but with synthetically achieved and simply expressed form. He was one of the first Bulgarian artists who developed industrial landscape. At a later stage Barakov created paintings, impressionistic in spirit.

So Zlatyu Boyadjiev, Vadsil Barakov and David Peretz subscribed to the history of Bulgarian art with the common direction in their young age, their personal individual contribution over the decades, and they remained forever linked by their students’ nickname Baratsite.

On the occasion of the exhibition was issued a bilingual (Bulgarian and English) catalogue of 100 pages with 114 reproductions, a comprehensive biography of Zlatyu Boyadjiev and a complete bibliography of the three artists.

The exhibition was organized with the collaboration of the Art Galleries in: Burgas, Varna, Vidin, Gabrovo, Dobrich, Kazanlak, Lovech, Pazardjik, Pernik, Pleven, Plovdiv, Ruse, Sliven, Smolyan and Stara Zagora, as well as the Academician Svetlin Rusev, the National Art Gallery, the Boyan Radev collection, the State Agency of archives, the Municipal Institute Ancient Plovdiv, the National Library in Plovdiv, The National Library Ivan Vazov - Plovdiv, section Local History, the Regional State Archives - Plovdiv, the Regional Museum of History in Blagoevgrad, The organization of Jews in Bulgaria - Shalom.

After Sofia, the exhibition will be shown in the Art Galleries of Plovdiv and Stara Zagora.