An artist and art critic from the street at 70
Floor 4, Hall 6
“This exhibition is a return to two of the sources of my (poor, in my opinion) imagination (but the world is rich and its content lurks everywhere).
The first are the pictures seen back in the late 1950s and still viewed with interest through a now retro bakelite diascope from the last century. It is preserved in our country in its original box and even with the instructions – “Model E”, a beautiful rarity once, before our television. These pictures were arranged in slide drums with the seven wonders of the world, the wedding of the Queen of England, parrots, Hollywood shows, the ascent of Vesuvius. The last one especially always reminded me of the final stop of tram five (the final stop of the line with the final traverse) and the start up Vitosha with the expectation that we would someday come across the terrible crater.
The second moment is my graphics for the 1970 film “Catch 22” based on the famous novel by Joseph Heller, skillfully adapted to the writer’s black humor. The genre of my cartoon (one of the things I have done in print – both as independent graphics and drawings) is mainly of the “black humor” type: this amuses me even more since I generally don’t understand anything about art, but in my field this is rarely of urgent need to anyone.
To all this I add a few satirical comics, as well as two satirical drawings from different times – my host is a museum of all genres in the funny and the sharp, I would not like to overlook that fact…
There is also a long drawing that slowly grows from exhibition to exhibition, perhaps until it itself becomes one. Its theme is reality, people and destinies – important to us, wherever they came from or will come to us…”
Kalin Nikolov
Kalin Nikolov was born in 1956 in Sofia.
He graduated from the Art High School and the Nikolay Pavlovich Institute of Fine Arts, majoring in Graphics and Graphic Technologies under Prof. Dr. Evtim Tomov.
He studied and worked with the artist Boris Dimovski.
He is currently a curator at the Graphic Department of the National Gallery, Sofia.
He has had solo exhibitions in Sofia, Gabrovo, Veliko Tarnovo, Hamburg, Athens, Budapest, Skopje, Ohrid, Dimitrovgrad and other cities.
He was an artist in newspapers such as “Vecherni noviny”, “Reporter 7”, “La Strаda” and the magazines “FEP”, “Terra Fantasia”, “Usuri”.
He is the author of books, monographs and research studies on Bulgarian and world fine arts.
Nikolov is a researcher of forgotten pages of Bulgarian cultural history – the Union of South Slavic Artists “Lada” (1904-1906), the Ukrainian sculptor Mykhailo Parashchuk and repressed Bulgarian artists.