OPERATIONAL CRITIQUE
IN THE RECESSES OF INTELLECT
SUMMARY:
Article about the exhibition of Wiliam Kitanov, 21 January – 4 February 2025, Hall 1C, Union of Bulgarian Artists, 6 Shipka Strеet
A remarkable Bulgarian graphic artist working in the field of graphic design. In a critical analysis, the text comments on the artist’s works–signs, logos, posters, various publications, philatelic graphics, etc.
Keywords: Wiliam Kitanov, exhibition, graphic design, logo, signs, philately, poster
WINDOWS TO THE METAPHYSICAL
IMPRESSIONS OF IVAN VUKADINOV’S RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION A PAINTING OUTSIDE THE PAINTING AT SOFIA CITY ART GALLERY
SUMMARY:
Ivan Vukadinov is one of the most significant Bulgarian painters and the first Bulgarian artist included in the Vatican Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. A year after his death, a retrospective exhibition in his memory, entitled A Painting Outside the Painting, was presented at Sofia City Art Gallery. The exhibition traces the artist’s stylistic evolution, which begins with the academic etude, undergoes the Impressionism lessons and reaches his characteristic style gravitating to reality and abstraction, concreteness and mysticism.
Vukadinov’s paintings create the impression of windows to a kind of metaphysical reality. With the appropriately directed lighting and the colour of the walls, they shine like stained glass in a Gothic cathedral, but within is also “embedded” modernised orthodox imagery.
His artworks raise questions, which quickly grow into admiration for the combination of an ancient technique and modern language. It provokes the literate addressee to ask how a work of art is possibly capable to captivate the viewer, taking him into an imaginary space shrouded in mysticism and half-expressedness.
These questions cannot be answered unambiguously. What has been achieved in Vukadinov’s paintings is a result of many factors related to the technique he applies, his knowledge of composition, his subtle pictorial feeling and in general, the entire way the artist has come.
The exhibition re-instates him as the creator of modern spiritual aesthetics, in which painting overcomes the two-dimensionality of the canvas, turning it into a window to the metaphysical and the eternity.
Keywords: exhibition, Sofia City Art Gallery, Ivan Vukadinov