Emil Bachyiski, 2016 (2016), glass, steel, 270 x 200 x 70 см
author: Vanja Koubadinska
We fervently start discussing glass as an artistic material every two years when the International Festival of Glass takes place. This year is the fourth consecutive festival offering many wonderful possibilities to get in touch with its fragile material and its three-dimensional world to discover its unsuspected potential.
International names and ever more frequently our own well-known and not so famous authors present their answer to contemporary questions of the plastic arts – a perspective which is rarely offered to us. On the whole, it is concentrated with the energy of this material which deserves much more attention and possibilities for reception, creation and discussion on a national and international scale. To look at the world through the glass means to see its potential and to yield it, as we can see from the exhibitions, to develop a concept, a vision.
The International Glass Festival in Bulgaria started in 2010 and takes working with glass in Bulgaria to a new, more contemporary level in its development with the study and the exchange of new ideas, authors and international practices. The presentation of new trends and educational programs are foreseen in the program in the years to come. An effort is made to research traditions and to turn glass into a means of expression of contemporary ideas.
The fourth edition of the festival got together some of the most interesting authors of the Bulgarian art scene. In four exhibitions we meet different artistic signatures transforming glass into a three-dimensional form and color. The landmarks of the exhibitions were Gallery Raiko Aleksiev, Arosita Gallery, the National Art Academy Sofia and Gallery Evdokia Art Glass with lectures and demonstrations made by Aimee Sones and Jane Rushton, USA about the GLASSTRESS event, part of the Venetian Biennial.
In the space of the exhibition hall of Raiko Aleksiev the glass pieces are easily recognizable when their creator is Katya Getsova – the delicate, ethereal forms, the lyrically carved line, the translucency of the idea. The pop art air of Bistra Lechevalier, the experimental approach and the audacious and surprising descisions of Anastasia Andreeva and Boris Shpeizman, Bobi Korudzhikov, Emil Bachiyski, Zoia Lekova, Nikola Enev, Pancho Kurtev and Philip Gaidov. The provocation to play with the glass is irresistible and often turns into a battle for control when the material at times takes the lead until the author gains back his position, but the result is always without doubt an inspiration on different subjects and so wonderfully sculpted. Many of the pieces set glass on the interdisciplinary borderline. Here we saw works made out of poured glass, working through the territory of sculpture, installation, portraits, painting, reliefs, creating a diagonal co-existence of different materials and genres in art. At first glance this cohabitation may seem at conflict, but when you go to the heart of their ideas, the different paths to topical questions lay before us – the spectators.
Unquestionably, glass is a material that requires physical exertion in difficult conditions. In an honest conversation, authors like Anastasia Andreeva compare glass with a living organism which for much too long has been used for decoration and industrial design. The shown pieces though without doubt prove that the artists have gone beyond that clichй. Moreover, they demonstrate to the visitor that glass becomes a medium of contemporary art. Anastasia Andreeva with her Shadows and Confession; Emil Bachiyski and his broken, geometrically re-united mirror surfaces; Bistra Lechevalier with the pop art sounding female torso, Bobi Korudzhikov with the portraits Blue-eyed person and Virgin Mary, Pancho Kurtev with his sculpture composition Frozen Route. Katya Getsova with her Adam and Eve and her installations. Special attention to the details of the femininity and the masculinity is put on the mythical figures of Adam and Eve. The combination with wood shrewdly interprets the complex structure of man’s body and soul – the limbs and other parts of the body are made of a more earthy and material emanation. While the finesse of the erotic effluence of the female and the male origins are conveyed thanks to the glass.
Unnoticeably we reach the question of who stands at the foundation of this wonderful, glass show? The central figure is Ekaterina Getsova – Katya, one of the founders of the contemporary dimension in the art of glass, who with initiative and organization creates the international platform for exchange between artists working with this material. The festival is not sufficiently financed so that it can unfold its full potential adequate to its significance. Sponsors are few and sporadically help out while glass is far from the genres of priority that could win advertisers and government assistance. What it has are the personal responsibility and resources of Katya Getsova and a circle of people who share her views.
That which distinguishes the work of Ekaterina Getsova is the search for new meaning in glass as a material and her taking on the challenge of transferring this material into the territory of contemporary art. This search was sown in her artistic thought from the time when Katya Getsova graduated her education in Prague, in the class of the famous professor Libensky. These ideas are characteristic of her generation whose goal is in overcoming the borders between “fine” and “applied” in Bulgarian art.
In the years a preferred subject of choice in the art of Katya Getsova is that of the woman. Let’s recall her exhibition at Gallery Yuzina in 2012 during the Second Edition of the International Glass Festival. Her avant-garde pieces are realized in transparent and semi-transparent figures of color glass in full size, like glass reliefs, objects. Her torsos develop the material as a vessel of a particular energy. They are not lifeless statues, but vibrant and enigmatic female figures. They ooze a certain dynamic, infatuating, conquering with their erotic magnetism and colors which as if naturally form the specific aesthetic of this idea. It is difficult to imagine a more feminine figure outside this plastic vision, to convey the fragility of the glass as an expression of the nature of women. Caught in the instance of her ripeness, freshness and vulnerable at the same time, carries a strength, but also an inspiration for the on-looker. Some of her glass moldings Katya displays in combination with ropes and glowing hoses, assigning them a specific borderline situation – between a sculpture and an installation. A closer look discloses their distinct glass forms, a result of the molding, cutting, coloring, engraving and the creation of the different textures.
Within the framework of the festival was an exhibition at a new and specialized gallery for glass “Evdokia Art Glass”. The participants there are well-known authors working exclusively with glass: Bobi Korudzhikov, Veselina Marinova, Danail Nikolov, Darina Tsureva, Evdokia Yoncheva, Katya Getsova, Maya Savova, Nikola Enev, Peter Malamat, Petar Savov. Paintings of glass we discover in the landscapes of Peter Malamat, Petar Savov and Maya Savova, glass drawings are shown by Darina Tsureva, conceptual sculptures – Nikola Enev and Vesela Marinova.
Drawings, city landscapes, paintings and figure sculptures – diverse in subjects and expression is the art of Petar Savov, one of the most interesting contemporary artists from Plovdiv. A student of professor Mito Ganovski, he graduated Mural Painting at the National Academy of Art Sofia and specialized Enamel in Saint-Petersburg. He is an author with successful artistic exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad with international acknowledgement and many awards. His pieces vary from the areas of enamel, glass to monumental techniques – stained glass, mural paintings are shown in numerous individual exhibitions and he is also a Laureate of the International Foundation Sinaid Ghi in Rome. Petar Savov’s glass works carry his characteristic style, interweaving intense colors with a mesmerizing energy that he himself was. Those who knew him saw a generous, wise, honest and untamable artist. He didn’t stand limitations, norms and kept turning to new forms for inspiration, telling stories, fulfilling visions that moved him. The stained glass and his sculptures of glass are the explorations of a restless spirit, looking for artistic freedom and innovative findings to contemporary problems. Expressive, but in his own way poetic, his style captivates with his spontaneous ideas and emotions. Before you know it you give yourself up to his influence and become a akin spirit, sharing his dreams and hopes for a better, more wholesome world, a person more open to the world and the human soul.
In gallery Arosita, the exhibition Artistic Glass acquainted us with new names. That of the students of the Veliko Tarnovo University St. Kiril and Metodi: Denica Todorova, Denitsa Dobreva and Plamen Kondov and of the students of the National Academy of Art Sofia (Porcelain and Glass Design BA): Maria Mihailova and Merlina Genova. The experimental seekings of these young representatives of this art take us into the artistic space of their visions in glass, as a material of pronounced presence, but also full of ideas and truths.
The emotional connection that Denica Todorova has made with the material of the glass is impressive. She sees it as a highly valuable material for artistic expression. Maybe that is why she has called her series Golden Connection. Her experiments and undertakings with hot techniques for molding the glass have found a new world which she fills with remarkable works by way of free blown glass. Her objective is to materialize her ideas, for the glass to stay free, to minimize her interference so that its innate qualities to unfold. Denica Todorova uncovers untrodden paths of the technique of blown glass, achieves plasticity and eloquence in the material: Glass provoked me to leave an imprint in it, as it left an imprint in me. I wanted to create a symbiosis between parts of my body and the glass surface. Simultaneously a third parallel space is created inside the glass balloon, shares the artist. The conceptual vision of Denica Todorova in making an imprint that is on the verge between the real and the unreal. The existence of the forms in the glass balloons are real, while the unavailability of the object that created the imprints correlates to the un-realness and the absence. The object is de-materialized by its reflection in the glass. In other words, it exists in two parallel worlds. The artist has discovered her own approach, sealing her sense of the glass, devoiding it of the object that has created the deformation. Thus she achieves an aesthetic that excites with its simplified formula.
The Fourth International Glass Festival Sofia 2016 was one of the rare opportunities to come into dialogue with this challenging art that has historical traditions, a trilling here and now, and an awaited intriguing future.
Denica Todorova, part of the serie Golden Connection (2015)