The upcoming exhibition at the Sofia City Art Gallery of Evgeniya Vodenicharova, or Genata, as her close friends call her, coincides with the retrospective exhibition of her friend Genko Genkov. Their two opposite destinies – that of unceasing wide popularity and the hidden creativity known to a minimal circle of admirers, will meet in the halls of Sofia City Art Gallery.

Evgeniya Vodenicharova’s handwriting is unique and completely different – unexpected, expressive and powerful, at the same time strangely delicate, atypical for the ‘70s of the last century. This is the time during which most of her works were created. She mainly paints portraits, landscapes and still lifes. The most common opinion about her is that she is not a Bulgarian artist.

Evgeniya Vodenicharova learned to paint in the 1960s and early 1970s, the time preceding the ideological agony of the canons of socialist realism, which began in the late 1970s and lasted until the mid-1980s. Then the clichés were more and more boldly attacked by individual artists, but these manifestations of the “decadent”, read as “Western influence”, are unreservedly punished. She chooses a topic for her diploma thesis – “Corrida” – which was rejected several times because it was clearly “heretical” in the time of labor-struggle plots. Only the advocacy of her professor Nenko Balkanski allowed her to graduate. Corrida is a theme of otherness, of the unexperienced but dreamy encounter with truth, with the real encounter between life and death.

Evgeniya Vodenicharova teaches at the Kazanlak art high school, where she mostly makes portraits of her colleagues. She participated in an exhibition of high school teachers in 1986, and two of her paintings, “Corrida” and “Portrait of Dimitar Vodenicharov”, were bought by Stara Zagora Art Gallery. Only in the landmark year 1989, the gallery in the “City of Roses” acquired two still lifes, and four years later an experimental landscape.

Until 2010, most of her works were not shown. A little later, a painting from the Corrida series participated in the exhibition “Haiku Spaces” in the Circle+ Gallery, and then her works were presented in the project “10x5x3” in the Shipka 6 Gallery and caused surprise among specialists and connoisseurs.

About 70 works – paintings and drawings – will be shown in the upcoming exhibition in the Sofia City Art Gallery.

Team:

Curator: Krassimir Iliev

Design of advertising materials: Svetla Georgieva

Restorers: Ilinka Chergarova, Svetlana Hristova, Milan Mihaylovich