The most slippery, the most dangerous thing in art is to develop an infatuation with the faddish and the trendy. Imitation is another danger. You can easily achieve some success by imitating. It is a fleeting success, though. Everlasting art is art that will continue to exist. Art that will outlast even your own demise. Any artwork you are creating at this moment in time should be valued for as many years to come as possible. Only then you can be sure that you have indeed been creating art worthy of recognition…

Dechko Uzunov, ‘Pogled’ (Vision) Weekly, issue 47, 1983

This February, the Sofia City Art Gallery’s team presents officially its new branch gallery – the Dechko Uzunov Art Gallery. The house that was the residence of the distinguished Bulgarian artist and intellectual Dechko Uzunov (b. 1899, d. 1986) is located at 24 Dragan Tsankov Blvd. It was turned into a museum more than a decade ago and recently has become again part of the network of house museums owned and run by the Sofia City Art Gallery. The house museum comprises of an exhibition hall and the artist’s studio. More than thirteen thousand paintings and graphic works by the artist are stored in his studio. Most of his works created using oil painting techniques are well known to exhibitions and museum audiences. However, there are still quite a few interesting and undisplayed works among the thousands of sheets with watercolours, drawings, projects, and sketches by Dechko Uzunov.
The ‘Fragments of Europe’ exhibition is dedicated to the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH 2018). It displays landscapes from some ten or so counties visited by Dechko Uzunov during his journeys throughout Europe. In his lifetime, the artist had the opportunity to visit almost all European countries, as well as some countries in Asia and in North and South America. The landscape paintings selected for this exhibition display different sceneries from France, Italy, Tukey, Greece, and elsewhere. The exhibition presents also short texts explaining when the artist sojourned in the respective country and which sites of outstanding cultural and natural importance are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.