Dimitar Shopov has a master degree in Stage Design from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia. He worked in the Sofia Theatre and Sfumato as a stage designer. Dimitar has had three solo exhibitions and he participated in a lot of group shows in Bulgaria and abroad. He dedicated the last ten years to the research of the life and the oeuvre of the artist Gavazov, as well as the search for artefacts related to him. In 2012 he edited a book-album dedicated to the artist and won the “South Spring” literature award.

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Dimitar Shopov

Photo: Dimitar Shopov

Gavazov and His Time

The Bulgarian and world art scene have discovered Bulgarian artist Milosh Gavazov after years he spent in obscure anonymity. The founder of the Postgraduate School of Ignorance and author of the legendary work “Molotov Cocktail” is now likely to leave a durable mark in the artistic life of avant-garde Europe and post­modern Africa.

According to art historian and critic Svobodan Palic (Gavazov’s) “destructive positivism is spreading like a plague, threatening to engulf a whole new generation in Europe”. Conceived in France, “the new movement has traveled eastwards, eventually striking a snag in the Balkans and returning to Western Europe as a sec­ondary blast”. It now keeps ricocheting between East and West, while slowly subsiding.

Gavazov’s art and life, as reconstructed in this exhibition, are the outcome of persistent shortages in the his­tory of Bulgarian art and the desire to articulate an elusive substance, made more complex by the migrant identity of an artist who has resided in multiple geographic, social and mental territories. His creative ex­periments can be classified with the hybrid forms of the early avant-garde and the transitional states of Euro­pean artistic life from the beginning of the 20th century. The exhibition aims to throw light on the missing links in Bulgarian cultural history and the surplus of mythical elements in Bulgarian cultural identity.