site.btaCurator Ivo Milev Arranges Exhibition "Emil Stoychev: Imagination Is My Bloodstream"

Curator Ivo Milev has arranged the exhibition "Emil Stoychev. Imagination Is My Bloodstream". The exhibition will be on display from February 27 to May 6 at the Sofia City Art Gallery, organizers say.

"This typical urban man and artist began as a landscape painter. By the mid-1970s, the characters that had sporadically populated his landscapes and interiors would come to dominate with a radically altered role - they would be the main center around which the “plot” of his compositional decisions would play out. Emil Stoychev will become a painter who tells stories and fables and will retain this quality until now. The painting begins to become a rebus, a field of meaning, and the psychology of the human images is of crucial interest," the team says.

For more than 30 years Emil Stoychev has divided his time between Paris and Sofia and continues to create. His figurative language is more and more mysterious and difficult to penetrate, it is the language of messages.

"Emil Stoychev is not a moralizer, he is a sceptic, treating life’s activities, our struggles, ups and downs with more of a mocking and ironic smile. There must be mystery in a picture, says Stoychev. Mystery is tempting and attractive as long as it remains secret. When it is revealed, it becomes mere banality. We can only be guided towards the mystery," the Gallery said.

The Sofia City Art Gallery says that an animation by Alexander Sokerov, dedicated to the exhibition, can be seen at the gallery of Unicredit Bulbank in Sofia. An accompanying exhibition “From the Studio” will open on March 13 at the gallery of the National Academy of Arts, where works by the artist from recent years will be displayed.