site.btaSofia City Art Gallery Honours Artist Dechko Uzunov for 125th Anniversary with Exhibition

An exhibition dedicated to Bulgarian artist Dechko Uzunov's 125th anniversary opened Thursday at the Sofia City Art Gallery. On display are more than 90 portrait, still life, landscape and composition pieces.

Titled "Dechno Uzunov. Creations", the exhibition is a project of curators Adelina Fileva, Plamen Petrov and Ramona Dimitrova. Restorers Ilinka Chergarova, Milan Mihaylov and Svetlanata Hristova have worked on some of the works.

The exhibition will be on until September 8.

The exhibition is the third event since the beginning of the year to commemorate the anniversary of the artist’s birth, the other two being the exhibition The Great Outlying. To Dechko Uzunov’s 1969 Exhibition and the Archaeology of a Scandal presented at the Kazanlak City Art Gallery (February – May 2024) and Dechko Uzunov. Secular Monumental Art at the Dechko Uzunov Gallery (February – June 2024).

The exhibition is a parTnership project of the Sofia City Art Gallery, the Kazanlak City Art Gallery and the Archives State Agency completed in cooperation with Bulgarian National Television. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Culture Programme of the Sofia City Hall, Aurubis Bulgaria AG, private individuals and the Bulgarian News Agency as a media partner.

The gallery says that the Creations is an attempt to follow the development of Dechko Uzunov as an artist and unique creator of Bulgarian art. It presents paintings by decade, as well as artworks showcasing the artist’s masterful use of watercolor techniques. 

Courtesy of the Bulgarian National Television, art lovers will also see Damyan Petrov’s documentary Uncle Dechko (2000).

Uzunov was born in 1899. In the 1930s, he became known as a master of portrait painting. Among his best-known works are Poet Liliev (1929), Theatre Director Masalitinov (1931) and Actor Krustyo Sarafov in the Role of Falstaff (1932). He started teaching painting at Sofia's National Academy of Art in 1938. He represented Bulgaria at the Venice Biennale in 1942, 1948 and 1964. As a stained-glass artist, he executed commissions for the Bulgarian National Bank (1942), the Palace of Justice (1938-43) and the University of Sofia (1980). He did a ceramic wall piece for the Opera House in Stara Zagora. He has done frescoes for the House of Culture in Karlovo and the National Theatre in Sofia. His last large public commission was a fresco entitled Apotheosis of Bulgarian Culture (1981) in Hall Nine of Sofia's National Palace of Culture. In his late works, including Self-Portrait (1979) and Cain and Abel (1979), he began to use abstract forms. In 1978, he was elected a member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was also president of the International Association of the Plastic Arts at UNESCO in Paris.

His work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.

He had solo exhibitions in Belgrade, Bucharest, Budapest, Moscow, Paris, Basel, Munich, Kuwait City, Beijing.

Uzunov died in Sofia in 1986.