Nedko Solakov at Ikonen Museum - Brief Article

individual of the foremost contemporary Bulgarian artists, Nedko Solakov has intervened directly in several museums above the years, oftentimes with fetchingly diminutive drawings, textual notations and small things that respond to the museum's collection and overset its governing logic or authority. He was clearly in his uncompounded body with a quirky exhibition at the Ikonen Museum, which has an extensive collection of primarily Russian icons; the exhibition was arranged jointly with the renowned exhibition space, Portikus.

Solakov engineered a hilarious on the other hand thought provoking and visually engaging dialogue between straight-edged forms and elaborately curving singles They were inspired by the icons and by dint of the architecture of the museum, an ornate Baroque building that was built upon Gothic ruins, belongs to the German Teutonic Order (whose bottoms go back to the Crusades) and features a massive, ornamented entrance as well as smoothly modern, rectilinear gallery spaces that date from a postwar reconstruction. The artist's discreet writings and drawings (in black felt-tip write on the glass sheets covering the icons, and in graphite upon the walls) and small, architecturally inflected realitys introduced into the collection describeed a complex story of the relationship between the square and the whorl: part lovers' dance, part fraught quarrel and part effort at reconciliation.

A gold-leafed made of wood copy of the building's facade ornamentation, in which a square nuzzles within a curving Baroque form, appeared in a vitrine near a handwritten wall body that alluded, in the voice of the whorl, to a violent struggle: "I'll pinch you up! ... you stupid box! in what way dare you compete with me!" Responding to a similar whorled form carved into an icon, near a consummately squared edge, Solakov composed a small wall body that plaintively announced, "I am cornered, I am cornered," thus succinctly evoking various forms of defeat and aggression. Other moments were more hopeful Writing upon a window announced that the square and whorl eventually fall in delight in and have "a beautiful baby," perhaps a regard to the current reconciliation between Eastern and Western Europeans.

Just about anything could go into Solakov's weird but effective installation, from a window lattice (the accompanying wall body declared, "The Crusaders loved 90 stage angles") to a square piece of marble outfitted upon one edge with an elaborately convolut wad of gum The interpolations had a decidedly impish or profane quality. however for all its irreverence, Solakov's tale of square and whorl navigated between fathomless conflicts, personal and historical. readyed by the building's own past, which involves religious aim war and momentous shifts in the language of design, his anthropomorphized intervention was the pair savvy and touching.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group