Exhibition Opening

Exhibition Opening
With a glass of wine

I painted until the daylight faded out by Georgi Jelezarov

18:00, Sofia Gallery

To honour the 115th anniversary since the birth of the classical Bulgarian artist Georgi Jelezarov the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in London presents his diverse work encompassing village and city landscapes, domestic scenes and local markets, executed in water colours, pastels and gouache.

A student of the Czech artist prof. Joseph Piter, he manages in his small canvases to manages to bring further the achievements of the great masters such as Yaroslav Veshin, Ivan Angelov and Ivan Markvichka and to come close to the painting plasticity of Boris Denev and Nikola Tanev in his landscapes and to Tseno Todorov in his domestic scenes paintings. He is among the artists who after the First World War revive the academic realism through the means of impressionism and to recast the national tradition without ethnographic elements. The works exhibited in London present the artist mainly with his domestic scenes and landscapes – of nature, village and town life. The exhibition contains a few winter landscapes cast in silver tender shades with mother-of-pearl-like nuancing of hues and tinges. His summer landscapes reveal the artist’s talent in portraying both the diffused light and the heavy-crowned trees with the glittering light spots on them and the colourful swarming of people engaged in daily chores. In these landscapes the gradation of hues ranges from glaring, overwhelming to subdued monochromic scale.

Georgi Jelezarov is as true a landscape-artist as is humanly possible. He paints in the open until there is light and prefers it when there are people – working, playing backgammon in the park, sitting on a bench in the city park and chatting away the time. In the works from the mature period of the artist one can feel the attractive refractions of late symbolism in the flexible lines of the silhouettes and the vibrating colour spots characteristic of the decorative interpretation of the Bulgarian variety of the Secession. The addition of the romantic-lyricised interpretation of scenes from domestic life and the unique pantheism of his landscapes are added to the artist’s other achievements make us confident that the Bulgarian Cultural Institute will offer the admirers of Bulgarian classical oil painting of the 20th century a really pleasurable experience.