site.btaGerman-Bulgarian Exhibition Celebrates Day of Bulgarian Letters and Culture

The Mission Gallery will host an exhibition, "Words - Windows / Wörter als Fenster" by the German artist Wolfgang Nieblich and the Bulgarian-German artist Antonia Duende, dedicated to the holiday of Bulgarian education and culture and Slavic writing - May 24. It is organized by the State Institute for Culture of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria in partnership with the German Embassy and can be visited between May 27 and June 14. The event is also part of a program for intercultural dialogue through art.

What unites the two authors is that for decades they have been integrating written signs and fragments of texts into their works, and thus the word becomes a kind of window to other worlds. In their paintings, the text gives rise to multi-layered associations and, last but not least, has an aesthetic effect as a plastic element in the compositions.

Since 1985, Wolfgang Nieblich has been exploring the interactions between type and picture. His "Word Pictures" cycle is one of the most comprehensive, next to the "Book" cycle. "Sometimes a picture is the spark that gives birth to a text, sometimes a word, a sentence, a text from a Latin manuscript, unicode or a fictitious letter, leaving open space for interpretations, is the occasion for creating a picture," says the author. The other cycle that Nieblich presents in the exhibition is called "Zipper Paintings".

Antonia Duende's interest in using fragments of texts, symbols and sacred signs in her paintings arose in 2005, when she discovered a copy of the so-called Baška tablet, Croatia /around 1100/ with Glagolitic texts in the state library in Berlin, from which she began to take frottages on handmade Chinese paper and then layer them with watercolors. This is how the "Glagolic traces" cycle arises. 

The opening of the exhibition will take place with the participation of German Ambassador Extraordinary Irene Plank. The director of the Goethe Institute-Bulgaria, Kirsten Hackenbroch, will also be present, and graphic artist and art critic Prof. Spartak Pascalevski will deliver welcoming words.