Zlatyu Boyadjiev and Baratsite is an exhibition organized by Sofia City Art Gallery and Art Gallery – Plovdiv. It consists of two parts – the first one includes iconic works by Zlatyu Boyadjiev from different periods, and the second is dedicated to his friendship with Vassil Barakov and David Peretz – the three known as Baratsite, tracking their common path in arts, as well as the personal development of each of them.

Zlatyu Boyadjiev will draw hundreds of compositions, portraits and landscapes in his creative life, marked by a watershed – the paralysis that determined his biography as an artist. So his work is divided into two periods. The first is characterized by the classic manner of composition, and in the picturesque building up is felt the influence of the Impressionists, of Renaissance masters and old icons, but the themes are always bound by Bulgarian nature, the small town and the village, with life in them. In the second period, when he began painting with his left hand, the style of the artist changed dramatically in the direction of imagery, including dozens of figures in the compositions and colours and expressive brushstrokes. His works acquired pronounced expressiveness and dramaticism. Some of them attract with their enjoyable story, while others are filled with bizarre characters, often as a disguise of symbolic meaning.

Fate made the three future artists meet in Plovdiv, where they had their first steps in art. That road started from drawing in the ruins of Kurshum Khan tavern, from the sign drawing company, the Academy of Arts, and their common lodging in Sofia, to take them out on the trails of the Rhodope mountains. Barakov, Boyadjiev and Peretz discovered their artistic means in this soft and beautiful mountain that attracted them
for years. And while the generation of Bulgarian landscape artists before them found beauty in old houses, their yards and alleys, it was Baratsite who discovered the Rhodope mountains for Bulgarian art as a plastic and sign image. The landscape in

the works of Boyadjiev, Barakov and Peretz is not just a beautiful view, but a specific creative attitude and mindset, depending on the purely subjective standpoint and feeling of the author.
Massive arrays, deep valleys, Rhodope style houses, curved paths, people and animals that inhabit them – they all possess the integrity and the forms that excited the three artists. They were attracted by the power of the mountain, its primary materiality, by the animate and the inanimate in it. The three artists, slowly over the decades, will walk their path from the Rhodope landscapes, through still lifes, figure compositions and portraits.
Peretz will create amazing landscapes and still life, turning them into high art. Over the years, he will go through figure composition with the means of synthetic expressive realism, reaching lyrical abstraction and progressively destructuring the image.
Barakov will be creative in still-life and portraits, but in all his works his preference will remain for the landscape genre. The artist’s early landscapes were expressive, with marked relief, saturated colour and dense texture, without minor details, but with synthetically achieved and simply expressed form. He was one of the first Bulgarian artists who developed industrial landscape. At a later stage Barakov created paintings, impressionistic in spirit.

So Zlatyu Boyadjiev, Vadsil Barakov and David Peretz subscribed to the history of Bulgarian art with the common direction in their young age, their personal individual contribution over the decades, and they remained forever linked by their students’ nickname Baratsite.

On the occasion of the exhibition was issued a bilingual (Bulgarian and English) catalogue of 100 pages with 114 reproductions, a comprehensive biography of Zlatyu Boyadjiev and a complete bibliography of the three artists.

The exhibition was organized with the collaboration of the Art Galleries in: Burgas, Varna, Vidin, Gabrovo, Dobrich, Kazanlak, Lovech, Pazardjik, Pernik, Pleven, Plovdiv, Ruse, Sliven, Smolyan and Stara Zagora, as well as the Academician Svetlin Rusev, the National Art Gallery, the Boyan Radev collection, the State Agency of archives, the Municipal Institute Ancient Plovdiv, the National Library in Plovdiv, The National Library Ivan Vazov – Plovdiv, section Local History, the Regional State Archives – Plovdiv, the Regional Museum of History in Blagoevgrad, The organization of Jews in Bulgaria – Shalom.

After Sofia, the exhibition will be shown in the Art Galleries of Plovdiv and Stara Zagora.