site.bta Lyuben Zidarov’s Fairy Tale Illustrations to Be Exhibited in Sofia

An exhibition of Lyuben Zidarov’s Illustrations for the Fairy Tales of Nikolay Raynov will open at the Stubel Gallery in Sofia. The vernissage will take place on January 27, and the exhibition will be on view until February 14, the gallery said.

"A few months ago, a new four-volume edition of Bulgarian Fairy Tales and Fairy Tales from Around the World by Nikolay Raynov appeared on the book market. Seven decades after the author’s passing, this latest reissue of the famous fairy tales offers something quite unusual. Many readers from different generations have preserved surviving copies or remember the two-volume edition published between 1974 and 1976, illustrated by Lyuben Zidarov," the gallery said.

Miranda Publishing House has not only given new life to this edition, but has brought it up to contemporary publishing standards, bringing together the original fairy-tale texts from their first editions of the 1920s and 1930s and many stories that were not part of the earlier edition. This is why the current publication consists of four volumes.

The exhibition features a large selection of Zidarov’s original illustrations for Nikolay Raynov’s fairy tales. For the audience, this will be a rare opportunity for an intimate encounter with the art of children’s book illustration - not through printed pages, but through the original artworks themselves - and thus to immerse themselves in the visual world of the two 'co-authors,' the writer and the artist, the gallery added.

Lyuben Zidarov was born on December 23, 1923, in Veliko Tarnovo, and grew up in Gabrovo, where he attended lower secondary school. He later graduated from high school in Sofia, where his family moved to live. He began drawing as a child and devoted more than seven decades to the art of book illustration. Zidarov is among the pioneers of illustrated comics in Bulgaria and of the modern movement in Bulgarian illustration. He held more than 30 solo exhibitions and received numerous national and international awards for book design and illustration.