Vernissage on Wednesday, 19 April, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m
The exhibition, ‘Yavor Tsanev (1956–2014): Metamorphoses’, is retrospective in character. It includes graphics, paintings and sculptural works owned by the artist’s family, and from the stocks of the Boris Georgiev Varna City Art Gallery, the Graphic Bureau at the Varna International Print Biennial, the Dobrich Art Gallery, the Iliya Beshkov Pleven Art Gallery, and private collectors.
Yavor Tsanev’s artistic output spanned the years between 1981 and 2014, when he produced his last works. An artist of indisputable talent, endowed with intellect and in-depth knowledge, he was an example of the creator for whom art meant not only skill and inspiration, but a spiritual journey in the formation of a new world mirroring his inner artistic world rich in conceptions of beauty, ethic, philosophy and historical eternity.
His ancestral memory of a person raised on the coast of Varna—where genetically interwoven cultures of different peoples and various ethnicities were connected by a universal historical dependence—opened up his mind from an early age to different philosophical and religious ideas, to the esoteric teachings and spiritual practices of the East and West from ancient times. In his mind, they emerged as resurrected visual images that transferred the mysteries of antiquity to our reality. They incarnated the harmony of the classical ideal of beauty from Ancient Hellas, through Rome and Hellenism, through the National Revival and Romanticism, in such a way that we can generally attribute the individual style of his compositions to the spirit of Postmodernism.
Tsanev’s powerful individuality was displayed in a continuous pursuit to enrich his art with novel means of expression, and solidify it with expanded intellectual insight, the impetus for which was also provided by his teaching activity as an associate professor at the Textile and Fashion Design Department of the Chernorizets Hrabar Varna Free University (founded in 1991) and, later, at the Department of Industrial Design of the Technical University in Varna. The artist turned to mythological or religious themes, and without hesitation immersed himself in those times. In his graphics and paintings, he mixed techniques from both types of art. In diary-notebooks, he recorded his conclusions from these experiments with empirical observations and reflections on the history of art.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue compiled by the artist’s wife, Tonya Tsaneva.
