PETAR CHUKLEV – drawings, graphics 26.02.-11.03.2025

PETAR CHUKLEV /1936-2024/

drawings, graphics

26.02. – 11.03.2025

Petar Chuklev is one of the great artists of this generation, who overturned the aesthetic notions of graphics in Bulgarian art. An artist who built his own mythopoetic universe with strange imaginary spaces and bizarre characters. Spaces in which the woman is a goddess, a witch, a nymph, a sorceress, and the artist is a miracle worker who creates mystical worlds, who possesses and transforms with his creative power and powerful imagination. Chuklev’s universe is populated with strange hybrid creatures, which emerged from the deep-psychic structures of the personality, from the wombs of cultural layering, from the mystery of Greek and Thracian mythological heritage, mixed with the cultural codes of the Renaissance, inverted through the codes of modernity, of surrealism with Picasso and Dalí. All of this is entangled in a complex multi-layered web of connections and associations. The entire graphic space is charged by the tensions, the over-compressions, the clusters and dilutions of a pulsating, astonishingly rich plastic morphology. Strange metamorphoses of forms and spaces, give us no peace in the exciting following of the artist’s creative imagination. In these fantasy surreal worlds populated by bizarre creatures, there is no before and now, no after, everything dissolves in the timelessness of a fairy-tale mythological world.

Stanislav Pamukchiev, February 2025