Stefan Nikolaev: I Walk a Labyrinth Which is a Straight Line

The exhibition will be presented at SARIEV Contemporary and St. Joseph Church, Plovdiv.

Opening: 19 May 2017

18:00 – opening at SARIEV Contemporary in the presence of the artist

18:50 – walking tour – 9 min. 

19:00 – opening of the second part of the exhibition at Saint Joseph Church

20:00 – opening of FLUCA – austrian cultural container (in front of SARIEV Contemporary)

SARIEV Contemporary is pleased to present the solo show I Walk a Labyrinth Which is a Straight Line by Stefan Nikolaev. The exhibition will be presented in two spaces in Plovdiv – the white cube of SARIEV Contemporary on 40 Otets Paisiy Str. and the Catholic Church from the 19th century St. Joseph[1]. This will be the first exhibition in the history of the St. Joseph Church, which will set the beginning of the collaboration between SARIEV Contemporary and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sofia and Plovdiv. The artist Stefan Nikoalev will be present for the opening and exhibition tour.

The most harrowing and pernicious of all labyrinths, according to Borges, is the one in which you don’t wonder in corridors, passages and tunnels, but you pass through a single rigid straight line. Stefan Nikolaev has taken on such, unusual for him, dramatic route, but trough out all of it he stares at the rear-view mirror in which he sees part of himself and everything that has passed - events, works, memories, dreams. His line of movement is just as straight and direct as the associative links between marble and sculpture, the painting and the frame, the reproduction and the original, the space and the function of the object. The paradoxes and the traps of the labyrinth appear with each shift of the gaze; ahead of its supposed exit or back to the path that one has already passed.