Opening on Thursday, 5 March, 6 pm
The exhibition marking the 70th anniversary of artist Nikolay Panayotov, outlines the trajectory of a long journey, where reality has always been merely a starting point. This exhibition brings together the artist’s key themes, images and attitudes that define his visual world: freedom of imagination, rejection of the canon, an ironic perspective on history, and the eternal feeling of flight.
The title, ‘Lunatically’, was borrowed from that of a painting by the artist and its eponymous text—a hybrid of an absurd story, a personal manifesto, and a myth. This tale may be read as a key to understanding Panayotov’s entire oeuvre.
The exhibition does not aim for retrospective exhaustiveness but rather invites the viewer to enter a space where the rational gives way to the intuitive, and the image functions as a conveyor of meaning beyond the literal. ‘Kissing Machine’, a 10-metre painting produced specifically for this exhibition is a particular counterpoint to the works from the early 1990s on display in one of the rooms.
The style of the artist is distinguished by a particular compositional structure, with a more monumental than easel-like rendition. Regardless of the format, and regardless of content and thematic concept, each of his paintings bears the features of a carcass carrying the elements of his authorial inventions, in a dynamic, open dialogue with the narrative of other paintings by the artist. The individual scenes and details possess a relative autonomy subordinated, however, to a frieze-like visual narrative.
In Panayotov’s works, figures, animals and objects coexist in combinations that seem simultaneously absurd and somehow inevitably closely knit. This art consistently avoids didactics, abandons direct commentary, and favours the language of metaphor, irony, absurdity and the grotesque.
The exhibition includes the latest works produced in Villeroy & Boch Bulgaria in Sevlievo in the summer of 2025. Through a pictorial intervention on the already existing shape of the sanitary ceramics, the artist builds a dialogue between the industrial and the gestural, between the finished volume and the free drawing.
Curators: Boryana Valchanova and Vessela Christova-Radoeva.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
