| Description |
The very comprehensively illustrated catalogue presents the work of one of the highest-profile Bulgarian artists of his generation. Like his career, divided between France and Bulgaria, his work is rich in references to an adolescence and a first contact with art experienced on the far side of the Iron Curtain, but it is also enhanced by extended exposure to idols and fetishes of the (more) western world.
Through a visual repertory which uses the precious, the monumental and the already-made, Stefan Nikolaev produces unusual alliances between popular culture and art history. An often ironical realism, a service weapon inherited from his experience of communism, enables him, in an intelligent and disenchanted way, to broach the anxieties of a consumerist society whose spell is being increasingly dissipated by sirens mainly on the other side of the Atlantic.
Writings and interviews by curators and critics (Iara Boubnova, Paul O’Neill, Emile Ouroumov) help us to explore different facets of this atypical oeuvre, which is one of the rare such corpuses coming from Eastern Europe not to focus first and foremost on a regional attachment, so as to better transmit a discourse going beyond the effects of fashion and folklorism. The interviews also cover the story of Glassbox, an independent space founded by the artist in Paris in 1997. |