Prof. Chavdar Popov, DA, presents ‘Painting’, Ivan Kanev’s exhibition, at the Prof. Vasil Gerov Hall.

On 15 October 2024, the exhibition, ‘Painting’, by artist Ivan Kanev, a donor to the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, opened at the Prof. Vasil Gerov Hall. Art historian Prof. Chavdar Popov, DA, a long-time professor of History of 20th-century Art at the National Art Academy in Sofia, presented the exhibition and spoke about the artist’s extensive creative career.

 

‘Few artists possess Ivan Kanev’s ability to express, so spontaneously and naturally, the concealed lyricism of the workday and the intimate nature of a certain subject or motif, hidden from the business viewpoint.

 

‘The artist’s landscapes, as a rule, are unpopulated. He has a strong affinity for small towns and villages, for the tranquil landscape, for such objects over which a person’s gaze usually passes without lingering or even noticing them. The hushed and hidden charm of the deserted narrow streets overgrown here and there with trees and greenery, of the cosiness and the worldly lived-in air of the low-roofed houses and small yards that accommodate illimitable human destinies, unfolds before the viewer.

 

‘A special place in his oeuvre is occupied by the Sofia theme—precisely that Sofia of modest, often untidy houses, of small lanes, of blank walls seemingly downcast but full of plastic values. But not only that—the artist manages to capture offbeat viewpoints of familiar and famous sites in the city centre. Naturally, he is also interested in the diversity and urban wealth of Sliven, which he has reflected in a series of chamber townscapes.

 

‘In his portraits, the artist seeks to reveal not so much the inner state or the complex conflicts of a personality as the stable psychological and physiognomic characteristics of the model that place him in harmony with the world and with himself.

 

‘Ivan Kanev’s works demonstrate an organic unity of finely reduced gradation of tonalities, of delicate gradations of spatial planes. As a rule, paintings represent a kind of amalgam of innermost poetry and engrossed contemplation, which is the very core of the visual image.’

 

Prof. Chavdar Popov, DA

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