To expose side-by-side works of art from the past couple of years and classic works of art has been an incredibly tempting, almost heuristic task. The very idea to select the artists and construct an artistic pair has been marked by its own history and abounds in sudden turns. Sometimes, it was the classic work that made me choose its modern counterpart but in most cases it was the contemporary artist and his/her latest works that had sent me in search for a predecessor. What I have actually been looking for in everyone’s works was authenticity and meaning. Among the new names, I was specifically looking for very recent arrivals, not yet misused by the media. As for the works by well-known artists, I decided to opt for those that I thought conceptually justified. In all my efforts, my motif had always been to prove that a single work of art could stand for the whole world. I also wanted to challenge others to think along the same lines and to discover layers, aspects and nuances; and to teach them to interpret the nucleus of imagery. I had deliberately disregarded usual parameters such as parallels in style or iconographic likeness. What I had been aiming at was to achieve, together with everyone else, something more precious and significant, namely the essence. As each pair naturally exhibited artistic differences, the dominant element in presenting them as a pair was also different. Such an approach is of course highly vulnerable and contesting it is also part of the game. The important thing is to try and gain insight into the understanding that it is the world of the painting that is infinite. Ryja Marinska curator BORIS GEORGIEV (1888-1962) – SVETOZAR BENCHEV (1962) GEORGI MASHEV (1887-1946) – SVILEN BLAZHEV (1953) IVAN MILEV (1897-1927) – IVAN MILEV (1957) NIKOLA AVRAMOV (1897-1945) – DIMITAR HINKOV (1972) IVAN NENOV (1902-1997) – VESSELIN NACHEV (1958) BENCHO OBRESHKOV (1899-1970) – EDMOND DEMIRDJIYAN (1951) LUBOMIR DALCHEV (1902-2002) – NIKOLAY MAYSTOROV (1943) ZLATYU BOYADJIEV (1903-1976) – YVA YARANOVA (1977) IVAN LAZAROV (1889-1952) – BOZHIDAR BONCHEV (1956)