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Events Calendar


NEDKO SOLAKOV

The Palace
Nedko Solakov, who lives in Sofia, is one of the most renowned artists of his generation. He has an impressive professional biography with over 100 solo exhibitions in illustrious museums across Europe, America, and Asia. He has also had long-standing collaborations with prestigious international galleries and has participated in numerous international biennales such as Istanbul, Sydney, Venice, New Orleans, Tirana, Sharjah, Riga, Kathmandu, Moscow, Seville, Sao Paulo, Yekaterinburg, and Thessaloniki, among others. Additionally, he has been part of group exhibitions curated by visionary curators.
Notably, he is the only artist living in Bulgaria who has represented the country at the Biennale di Venezia and has been also included three times in its main curatorial project.
In 2007, he received an “Honorable Mention to an artist exhibited in the central international exhibition” at the 52nd Biennale. Nedko Solakov has also twice participated in the world’s most prestigious contemporary art exhibition, Dokumenta in Kassel.
At the core of Nedko Solakov’s immense success is his art’s ability to resonate with a diverse spectrum of viewers. His stories resonate with all, from sophisticated curators to those who find themselves in museums by chance. His visual language is a dynamic ‘conversation’ between drawing, painting, objects, space, and almost always text – narrative, description, commentary, and word games. His stories themselves are a kind of encyclopedia of the present time – art and artists, nature in all its diversity, current politics, social issues, and the heroes of the day, all woven together by the author with a wealth of emotion and humor, often with self-irony.
The project “A Cornered Solo Show” began back in 2021, when the artist approached directors and chief curators of well-known museums with the request to provide him with an “insignificant” corner in their buildings – a corner that has never been used for exhibitions, but which the public has access to.
So far, three “corners” have been realized in major European museums: #1 at MUDAM – the Grand-Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg (2021), #2 at MAXXI – the National Museum of Art of the Twenty-First Century in Rome (2022), and at the Belvedere in Vienna, which is hosting the “Cornered Solo Show #3 (with Charles Escher as my artistic conscience),” until June 19 this year.
All three exhibitions, united by an unusual, strange, previously unused corner space, tell completely different stories created specifically for their context. At the National Gallery, in such a previously unused “new,” albeit obvious and easily accessible space in the Palace, “A Cornered (Future) Solo Show #4” tells the imaginary story of a humble court painter and his friend, a tiny mouse, who are living under the staircase of the palace. Iaroslava Boubnova, curator of the exhibition.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Exhibitions

Friday 31 May 2024