Is 30 years long enough to understand and connect with your roots? This is the “search” that Stanislav Bozhankov started 30 years ago… In the “Retro-Section” exhibition, we will see the generic, personal and historical themes that excite the author. He himself says that thanks to the studentship he spent in Krakow, he understood that there is no way to fit into the world of art if he does not turn to his “Balkan roots”. The “personal DNA”, as he expresses it, manifests itself through understanding the archetypes, searching for answers, in the Thracian heritage, the connections with Byzantium and even the imprint of the Neolithic era on the Bulgarian lands. His works bear the symbolism of the past and encode the signs of self-knowledge and its search. We immerse ourselves in a research activity that makes you think about your own ancestry, to search for the artifacts to your soul.
His graphics bear the imprints of the unknown in us, the shadows of all before us, preserve the ancestral memory. The images of a human head, an egg, fragments of lost signs in the earth, warm colors – yellow, green, red are what are the basis of the symbolic language, an alphabet that if we can decipher, we will arrive at answers that maybe, always we knew.
For Bozhankov, graphic art is only a means of expression that he uses to develop his research activity, through the many and varied techniques that it provides. Stanko works in aquatint, etching, collography, linocut, mezzotint, likes to experiment, even makes his own paper. For him, experiment is leading, so much so that even when making paper, he creates it against all the rules for making it.
In the thirty-year “section”, which Stanislav Bozhankov will present to us, we will see works from the cycles “The City”, “Portrait Illusion”. “Sub-staion” and one of his latest graphic paintings. From the titles of each cycle that we mentioned above tells us the purpose of his works, to understand about himself and about man, his relationship with other human beings and evolution, does it even exist?!
