A large exhibition entitled “Re/-Evolution of Women. Change of roles” opens on April 30, Tuesday, at 6:00 p.m. in the capital’s “Vaska Emanuilova” gallery – a branch of the SGHH.
The exhibition, which can be viewed in the cozy art space on “Yanko Sakazov” Blvd. from June 15 to 20, includes 22 works by Bulgarian artists from the funds of the Sofia City Art Gallery, among them Aneta Dragushanu, Boryana Rossa and Oleg Mavromatti, Vaska Emanuilova herself, Mariela Gemisheva, Sevda Shkutova and others, covering a wide time range. The selection presents the use of the “female image” in Bulgarian art from the second half of the 20th century to the present day and emphasizes its atypical roles, for example its ideological use in art after 1950. At the same time, it presents the woman as a creator, illustrating the reversal of the traditional positions of the artist ( male) – model (female).
In Bulgarian art, the female image as a symbol of mourning, resistance, resilience was actively present even before the Second World War. The figure of the grieving mother is one of the most common metaphors for reflection on world revolutions and their human cost. Most authors from the Society of New Artists, to which Vaska Emanuilova belongs, work with this aspect of the female figure in their work, which is already charged with a new social mission. During the first decades of socialism (the 1950s and 1960s), the synthesis between the folk tradition and the influence of the Paris school was expressed in a politically verified language that derived its themes and plots from the classics and the Christian tradition. “Mother” becomes an emblem of memory and traumatic historical events, but also of the new social role of women, which assigns her new functions, until then inherent to men.
As a result of the active work with the biography of Vaska Emanuilova, the exhibition presents the woman as an active participant in the socio-political processes of the second half of the 20th century and focuses on the artists’ interpretation of the female image in its anti-erotic and anti-aesthetic aspect. Vaska Emanuilova uses almost exclusively female models and most of her works are dedicated to a female archetype separated from the context of the time (“Shepherd”, “Shepherd”, “Rest”, etc.). In the exhibition, her view is supplemented with examples of women, equal participants in “socialist construction”, in the works of Stoyan Venev, Vera Lukova, Stoyan Sotirov and other authors of her generation.
An update on the topic is offered by some contemporary works from the SGHH fund. Out of myself by Mariela Gemisheva and “Robot, Revolution, Onanism!” by Boryana Rossa and Oleg Mavromatti, for example, are emblematic of this widely represented theme in contemporary Bulgarian art, which the exhibition in the “Vaska Emanuilova” gallery does not pretend to exhaust.
The curators of the exhibition are Galina Dekova and Galina Dimitrova, curators of the “Vaska Emanuilova” gallery.
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Tags: ReEvolution Women takes Vaska Emanuilova Gallery
