Yoan Leviev 90th anniversary exhibition opens on October 8 at Plovdiv City Art Gallery’s Hall 2019
An exhibition of works by renowned Plovdiv-born artist Yoan Leviev opens at Plovdiv City Art Gallery’s Exhibition Hall 2019 on October 8 at 6pm and continues until November 3 2024.
The exhibition, featuring close to 85 paintings, is being held to mark the 90th anniversary of the October 31 1934 birth of Leviev, who died in March 1994 at the age of 59.
A member of the innovative Plovdiv School of the 1960s, Leviev’s work encompasses the fields of easel and monumental painting, murals, decorative panels and mosaics.
Among the canvasses included in the October 2024 exhibition are some from the the cycles the Ways of the Tsars, and Achilles.
Plovdiv City Art Gallery director Krassimir Linkov, curator of the exhibition, said that the Leviev works on show included those that the artist himself especially valued.
The compositions in the Achilles cycle “are impressive spectacles of the catharsis of the human soul, of the struggle for supremacy, in which the triumphant victory degenerates into a sham outburst of intoxication,” Linkov said in a monograph about Leviev’s works.
A cycle that Leviev began in the 1989s, about kings and jesters, about puppeteers and puppets, tranposes the historical watershed of social changes in 1989 and that unfolded in the new democratic era.
The acute social sense of the great artist quickly saw this eternal tension between authority and the intellectual, expressed metaphorically through mediaeval court personages.
Wrote art critic Ivan Marazov: “His jesters are always pensive and sad…They are the dynamic element in the paintings, they are the bearer of the ideas in them…in many of these images we will find elements of self-portrait”.
The exhibition also includes striking portraits of the artist’s father and mother, as well as theatre director Yulia Ognyanova, opera singer Assen Chadarov, writer Zdravko Popov, singer Pasha Hristova and other famous contemporaries of Leviev. Delivered with Leviev’s characteristic emphatically and drama, they are at once poetic and deeply personal in attitude.
Also on display will be paintings from other important themes and genres in Leviev’s work: legends and tales, social issues, Plovdiv, landscapes, and works from the series Archangels, and Man – Subject of Study.
