A sculpture and painting exhibition in Sofia’s GreenCat gallery by Ivaylo Savov Ivaylo Savov is a leading name in modern Bulgarian sculpture. He graduated from the Troyan art school in ceramics in 1980 and from the National Academy of Arts in sculpture in 1994 in the class of Prof. Dimiter Boykov. He exhibited his works for the first time in 1990 in the Sculpture National Exhibition at 6 Shipka St., Sofia, and in the Leal gallery in Paris. This was followed by exhibitions and participations in Le Nouveau Mur gallery and the European art salon Europ’Art (1992), Geneva, Theatre de Poche Gallery, Vevey, Switzerland and Krida Art, Sofia (1994), Du Lac, Neon, Sweden and Dosev, Sofia (1995), Lotos, Vienna, and Falle, Geneva (1996), Campo&Campo, Antwerpen, Belgium (1997), Frank Menier, France and Aniksys, Baden, Switzerland (1999).

Intelligence in sculpture is expressed in plastics and rich imagination. Those are the characteristics of the works of Ivaylo Savov. A modern author, who offers live and dense forms, a light play with colour, which links him to the early periods of all great epochs – Egypt, Greece, the Renaissance... One need not wish him success – he has found complete fulfillment. Vladimir Ginovski, author of the sculpture composition “Cyril and Methodius” in front of the National Library in Sofia

The sculptor shows bronze plastic figures and several paintings in Sofia’s GreenCat Gallery (6 Varbitza Str.) from September 29 till October 29. This exhibition is his return to the Bulgarian art scene following a break of five years and a series of meetings with Europe’s audience. There are several key topics in his art: “Clownage”, “Man-nature”, “Women’s secrets” and “Insight”.

Special accent in the GreenCat Gallery exhibition and a surprise for the viewers are the canvases which Ivaylo paints for pleasure, but which also show the author’s attitude to experiment and his craving for a direction other than the three-dimensional plastic language of sculpture.

In 2000 Ivaylo Savov won the Licorna (Unicorn) competition for monumental sculpture of Le Miroir du Maitre Gallery in Geneva. The sculptor is an official artist of the Swiss Sabeny gallery with a year-round exhibition alongside with works by Modigliani, Giacometti and Botero and since this year he is working with the Bulgarian-Belgian GreenCat Gallery. He is also the author of the Graviton annual science fiction award and the “Petle” prize of the Foreign Investment Agency.

Nadezhda Maneva, manager of GreenCat Gallery said: “Ivaylo is a European artist all through. We barely managed to get in touch with him, we were told that he was ‘heavy artillery’ and would be hard to get. Luckily even at our first meeting everything turned out well.”

The renowned Bulgarian art critic Hristo Kovachevski wrote in his monograph on Ivaylo Savov: “Creation by this Bulgarian sculptor starts with an instant spiritual sensation and continues with a high degree of working capacity and freedom! In his art the clown dances, animals are magic and motherhood is a boat carrying life!”

Journalist Rayna Yotova talks to sculptor Ivaylo Savov

How did you recreate in your exhibition the theme of love, perfection and balance in life?
I have a work which represents a clown, with the bird of happiness perched on his shoulder. It is a large monumental work. The bird of happiness is like scales, the clown has indeed caught a bird, but at the foot of the composition there is another bird. Whether happiness is the bird in the hand or the bird at the foot we find out later. That’s life.

One of the many works that I have kept in my memory is the work “Caesar and Cleopatra”. Is it part of the cycle of love and why does it interest you?
I have been working on the theme of love for a long time. When I worked on “Caesar and Cleopatra” I also worked on the sculpture “Love in the form of scales”. The works are two different interpretations of the “eternal theme”. I wanted to express the philosophy of love through a movement of the hands. One hand holds a miniature of a man and a woman embracing and the free hand expresses the role of fate.

How deep do you go in sculpture? Can you feel the limit of your possibilities or is the road in art endless?
It is both endless and determined by the audience... But my teachers have taught me that sculpture is an infinity of 3D possibilities and intellect. Movement is infinite as the depth of a soul.