In the Vaska Emanuilova Gallery in Sofia until May 21 visitors would be able to see works by young artist Stefan Ivanov. In his exhibition he tries to show how modern sculpture could look like. The exhibition is entitled "Unforeseen Circumstances." It has united diverse topics, looking deliberately for sculptural incidents - each work is associated with an action: cutting, biting, spilling, pushing, etc. The works are certainly memorable: a silver carp, held in a clamp, metal donuts in front of an old pink TV, an exquisite antique table sticking out of the wall, a metal baby lying among a bunch of cans in a shopping cart... Stefan Ivanov builds on the experience of pop art and hyperrealism in order to show how objects are becoming independent from humans in today's world.

But where will the works go after the exhibition?

"My approach to the exhibition was to work specifically for the gallery’s space," Stefan says. “Some of the things you see are spilled on the floor; others are directly glued or mounted to the walls. We have chosen this approach and the works could be shown in a different gallery but the space should be carefully selected. Some of the more standard works could be exhibited elsewhere or go to private collections. However, when I created my works I kept in mind the space of the gallery.”

"What we see in the hall are many different approaches, experiences, in which the artist is literally like a DJ who mixes things that already exist in culture, combines and transforms them into objects,” says curator of the gallery Vladiya Mihaylova. “There is a link with pop art and the idea of consumer society, but it is not pop art. There is also a link with the so-called ready-mades - everyday objects selected and designated as art. There is design in the works of Stefan because the sculptures are not on pedestals, but on some pieces of furniture that are part of the sculptures. This is a complex visual language, combining sculpture, painting, and design. It is a language of high art and in this sense what Stefan does is very interesting.”

Stefan Ivanov also creates commercials. According to him, this is a job that is similar to sculpture, because in most cases it is all about spatial installations. He also works on projects for collector’s coins of the Bulgarian National Bank. He has already created a few coins made of silver and gold.

"Last year they cut a thousand pieces of a gold coin with an image of the Holy Prophet Elijah on it,” he said. “I had won a contest also with a design of a coin with the Troyan Monastery on it. I created a silver coin dedicated to the hundredth anniversary of Bulgarian aircraft construction. All this is very valuable for me because the technique used is a classic one. And it is a kind of proof of my knowledge of this craft. Working with coins is very precious experience to me."

We'll add that Stefan Ivanov is sculpture graduate of the National Art Academy and has participated in exhibitions, symposia and workshops in Bulgaria, Greece, Sweden and Turkey.

"If you think about the situation today, we all exist in a world that constantly produces images and objects,” says Vladiya Mihaylova. “Every day new products are coming to the market and new images emerge in social networks and we now can hardly understand this world. Our speed of grasping the processes is slower than the speed of production of images. And this more modest position when a person is no longer master of the world that he produced, can be felt in the works of Stefan. They are really relevant today; they create suspense using objects we constantly use. The task of art is to separate them from everyday life and to present them in a different light. That's what happens in the Vaska Emanuilova gallery."

English: Alexander Markov