Exhibition ‘Emil Stoychev – Imagination Is My Bloodstream’ at Sofia City Art Gallery from February 27

An exhibition entitled “Emil Stoychev – Imagination Is My Bloodstream” opens at Sofia City Art Gallery in Bulgaria’s capital city on February 27 and continues until May 6.

The exhibition is a retrospective, held on the occasion of Stoychev’s 90th birthday.

Stoychev is one of the most significant figures in Bulgarian fine arts from the second half of the 20th century, the gallery said.

His first appearance before the public took place in the current building of the Sofia City Art Gallery, when he exhibited his works at the emblematic First Youth Collective Art Exhibition in 1961.

The exhibition had the glory of the first significant “thaw” in art after the death of Stalin and the April Plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1956), the gallery said.

This generation of artists would be called the April generation, and in the following years, it would give rise to the new look of Bulgarian fine arts.

With his first solo exhibition (1965), Stoychev was recognized as a phenomenon such critics and observers of artistic life with a nose for the new like Kiril Krastev, Vladimir Svintila, and Dimitar Avramov.

He began as a landscape artist.

“From the mid-1970s onwards, the figural characters that had sporadically populated his landscapes and interiors up to now would become dominant, with a radically altered role—they would become the main organising centre around which the ‘plot’ of his compositional decisions would develop,” the gallery said.

“Stoychev would transform into a narrative, allegorical artist, a quality he has retained to this day. The painting begins to turn into a rebus, a semantic field, with the psychology of human figures being of decisive interest,” it said.

For the past 30 years, Stoychev has divided his time between Paris and Sofia, and he continues to create.