Exhibition dedicated to the Kyustendil Operation to Save the Jews

In connection with the anniversary of the Kyustendil Operation to save the Bulgarian Jews from the death camps – March 9, 1943, the second level of the Dimitar Peshev House Museum will host an exhibition by the Kyustendil artist Stanislav Bojankov. “The current exhibition shows works from several cycles of particular importance to me. And not only because they run through my entire presence and subject matter, not only because they are part of my technological experiments, but also because they are painfully localised at the beginning of my path as an artist. The series “Portraised Fossils”, “Premonitions of a Portrait” and “Experience of Flying”, which emerged in the mid-1990s during my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, have been continued in their messages with the brand new and not yet shown cycle “Nightmares” (2024). The direct reason is a visit of mine to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, near Krakow. The works themselves appeared quite spontaneously and, of course, after the shock and the long, albeit invisible trauma of what I saw and felt there – in the very center of hell. A trauma experienced gradually and overcome intellectually and emotionally in the only possible way – with good energies and doubled creativity. Auschwitz – a Museum of the Universal Wound in itself, a difficult-to-understand collection of pain, placed in time, as a shameful testimony to fierce uncivilisation. After Mozart, Goethe, Beethoven, Chopin, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Einstein, Copernicus… That was in the mid-90s… I didn’t dare to go a second time. So there, perhaps, are part of the roots of my long series of portrayed fossils and heads, passing through the years – peculiar premonitions of portraits, metaphorical visions, gathering within themselves the entire range of emotions, gestures and human states, the entire frozen truth about our physical and spiritual existence, in the context of the dramatic states of our biology and Spirit. And containing a special mysticism, emanating from the portraits, possessed by the abstract magma of personal pain – heads, absorbed in their achieved “eternity”, touched only by our Sisyphean hopes and the overwhelming gradualness of life, dramatically reminding our entire essence of our definitions of meaning, of good and evil…” shares the artist.

The exhibition opens on March 6 (Thursday) at 5:30 p.m.