site.btaExhibition to Mark 90th Anniversary of Artist Stefan Gatsev's Birth

An exhibition, titled "I, the Artist", chronologically recreates the creative path of Stefan Gatsev (1935-1986) on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of his birth. The event will open on Tuesday, April 15, at the Sofia City Art Gallery, the organizers said.

The exhibition includes about 80 works. Some of the works are owned by the artist's family, others are from private collections, as well as from the collections of the Sofia City Art Gallery, the National Art Gallery, the Boris Denev Art Gallery in Veliko Tarnovo, the Petko Churchuliev City Art Gallery in Dimitrovgrad, the Dobrich Art Gallery, the Plovdiv City Art Gallery, the Smolyan Art Gallery, the Stara Zagora Art Gallery, the Regional History Museum in Blagoevgrad, the Regional History Museum in Kardzhali.

Gatsev studied at the National Academy of Arts under Prof. Iliya Petrov and Prof. Georgi Bogdanov. He was a painter with a precise insight, a master of composition, and possessed a pronounced sense of monumentality of form and an enviable sense of the tectonics of volumes, while at the same time managing to be laconic and impressive with the most economical means, the Sofia Art Gallery said.

The main core of Gatsev’s pictorial work was created in the 1960s and 1970s, including his fundamental large-format figurative compositions "Concrete", "Rails", "Height", "Apocalypse", as well as the polyptych "Dawn". After the mid-1970s, Stefan Gatsev devoted himself to decorative-monumental art, and his pictorial work was reduced to more line-focused chamber formats, which were more form-building, precise, but at the same time expressive,  the Sofia Art Gallery added.