The exhibition “The landscape and the city” in the Varna gallery “Boris Georgiev” covers works of three generations of Bulgarian artists

The Varna Art Gallery “Boris Georgiev” dedicated an exhibition to the urban landscape, which opens this evening. It includes paintings from the collection of the art museum, which are unknown to the cultural public. They present 37 artists from three generations in Bulgarian art, emphasizes the curator Rumen Serafimov, who is the chief curator at the cultural institute.
According to him, this genre in fine art has been developing in our country since the very beginning of the 20th century. The earliest Bulgarian author in this field was Nikola Petrov, who created poetic anti-style paintings of Sofia and Vidin architectural landmarks. Nikola Tanev, Danail Dechev, Boris Denev also work in the impressionistic style. Tsanko Lavrenov dedicated quite a few paintings to the romantic urban atmosphere of old Plovdiv.
Some of the paintings in the exhibition are by artists who began their creative journey in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, which, according to Serafimov, was a very strong period for Bulgarian art. Among them are Boris Denev, Danail Dechev, Vera Nedkova, Dechko Uzunov, Bronka Gyurova, Hristo Kavarnaliev, Preslav Karshovski, Georgi Pavlov – Pavleto, Petko Abadjiev. The curator believes that their landscapes retain realistic credibility, carry romanticism and suggest calm, poetic moods. Only Hristo Kavarnaliev is more expressive for him, and Vera Nedkova is modern and her conventionality borders on abstractness.
Another large group of authors represented in the exhibition appeared on the art scene in the 1960s. Among them are the Varna artists Daria Vasilianska, Margarita Deneva, Hristo Vekov, Yordan Yordanov, Dora Kancheva, Angel Atanasov, Iliya Kasabov. Their works, according to Serafimov, are much more conventional in form with structuring of the compositions as color spots and linear-plastic proportions of the architectural motifs. Andrei Daniel offers a lively, sensual and completely liberated artistic view of a famous street in Varna.
Among this group there are significant names of the latest Bulgarian art such as Georgi Bozhilov with an early landscape, Lyuben Zidarov with watercolors, Svetlin Rusev with a chromatically ascetic landscape of Melnik, Rumen Gasharov with a naïve composition of a railway station, Hristo Stefanov with a monumental canvas, as well and Emil Stoychev, Dora Boneva, Veselin Parushev.
Rumen Serafimov emphasizes that the museum exhibition of classical Bulgarian artists gives an opportunity to meet various stylistic interpretations from realism, impressionism, expressionism, neo-primitivism, to modern autonomous painting.
The exposition can be seen until May 16.