CLASSICS OF MODERN BULGARIAN PAINTING – part II, 27.01.-13.02.2026

CLASSICS OF MODERN BULGARIAN PAINTING – part II

Atanas Patsev, Atanas Yaranov, Genko Genkov, Dimitar Kazakov–Neron, Ivan Georgiev – Rembrandt, Stefan Gatzev

27.01.-13.02.2026

The exhibition “CLASSICS OF MODERN BULGARIAN PAINTING” presents iconic, mythological names in Bulgarian art. Atanas Patsev, Atanas Yaranov, Genko Genkov, Dimitar Kazakov – Neron, Ivan Georgiev, Stefan Gatzev– today regarded as avant-garde, the pride and dignity of a cultural territory at a specific time – the 1970s and 1980s, when the relatively stagnant socio-cultural context gave rise to a reaction, a will and a longing for a new art. Art that craved artistic freedom, passionate revelation in the great energies of 20th-century world modernity. Times when the measure, the criterion for powerful art was its autonomous, extremely subjective, emotional, psychological, and spiritual energy. A time when an exalted experience of conditional reality, of purely plastic relationships, a struggle to achieve an inimitable artistic code, an autonomous plastic lexicon, and the creation of one’s own mythopoetic world arose.

Atanas Patsev, Atanas Yaranov, Genko Genkov, Dimitar Kazakov, Ivan Georgiev demonstrated the value of their creative freedom, their personal and spiritual breakthrough, at the cost of suffering social misfortune, ascetic seclusion, self-sacrifice, and a doomed devotion to the truth of art.

Genko is synonymous with the rebel who exploded onto the artistic scene with the extreme expression of his painting. Ivan Georgiev-Rembrandt unlocked the energies of the profound psychological potential of form and colour. Yaranov took his maximalist, stylistically pure, symbolically monumental figurativism to its ultimate conclusion. Gatsov’s raw, epic realism fought for the truth, Patsov created a cosmos, and Kazakov unleashed the ecstatic pagan energies of his people to give them to the world. Each of the artists presented brings out the result of their artistic nature, their unique thematic and plastic discovery, their radical rebellion against boredom and conformism in art.

Today, we are the ones who are gifted, illuminated by the creative power of these exceptional artists who have marked Bulgarian culture with their presence over the last five decades.

Prof. Stanislav Pamukchiev