Angel Stanev is an artist who, in the late 1970s, boldly transformed the routine plastic language of sculptural material. At first glance, his works resemble sketches, moreover that many of them are misleadingly called exactly this way. In fact, everything unnecessary in them is drastically removed in order maximum concentration of depiction to be obtained. Space powerfully invades matter, blows away the unneeded and leaves laconic fragments built with filigree delicacy. This unusual artistic language has been eagerly accepted and thus it raised numerous followers in the range between the simple plagiarism and the creative artistic communication.

The exhibition was contemplated as a narrative of the events in Bulgarian sculpture since the mid 1970s until nowadays – its most dynamic period through the art of its most heuristic representative. It is no coincidence that the exhibition is in Sofia City Art Gallery where the most of Angel Stanev’s works are kept. Among them, there is Swing with Muse (Dedication to Dimcho Debelyanov), a work charged with sarcasm to the illusory expectations for creativity, that deservedly provoked unrest debates for an hour among the jury of the Youth Exhibition in 1978; there is also Head from 1979; Figure from 1979, played on the thin string of a violin; as well as the wind drifted Figure from 1984.

His works combine extreme sensuality and radical asceticism, and they represent an uncompromising, consistent exploration of the wind sound in the bell, of the empty space of a swing and the rhythm between swings, of the echo of the ring – more and more laconic, more and more powerful. For this exposition, Angel Stanev created a version of a composition of his, which has been thought over for decades. In it, the voice of the bell and echoing of the ring combine in a monumental scale. We can discover these sounds still in his early drawings. For the artist, the drawing – even when embroidered with magnifying glass, even though being a result of an explosion of spots and lines – has the mission of a creative enlightenment which can unlock plastic transformations for decades.