The exhibition Dechko Uzunov/Dinko Stoev. States is the third one in the programme Meetings Beyond Time at the Dechko Uzunov Art Gallery. This series is based on the idea of entering Dechko Uzunov’s art into a dialogue with the work of a contemporary artist. The painter Dinko Stoev has been invited for this edition.

Stoev was given the opportunity to examine the collection from Dechko Uzunov’s studio and make a selection of the artist’s works, taking into consideration which of his own works he would unite them with in the current exhibition. In the process of communication and work, several creative directions emerged and were delineated—self-portrait, landscape, and composition. Dechko Uzunov’s self-portraits are placed in dialogue with a work from Dinko Stoev’s series Bite. Another parallel was sought through the comparison of a series of watercolours—natural landscapes created in the last years of Dechko Uzunov’s life, which are in dialogue with a work from Stoev’s Sunflowers series. At first glance, the two artists seem incompatible, with radically different pictorial approaches, but both are connected by a consistent graphic manner of understanding the world. Also characteristic for them is their invariable striving to convey different psychological states. These are not states that we understand as momentum, but rather existential ones that provoke reflections on the eternal search, on the path of creation, and on a kind of exploration of the self. This exhibition does not aim at contrast or comparison, but invites a different, deeper and multi-layered understanding of their respective work.

Dinko Stoev is a significant figure in contemporary art on the Bulgarian art scene. He graduated from the Academy of Art, majoring in Painting under Prof. Ivan Kirkov. He did post-graduate work as part of the British Council programme at the College of Arts in Bath, UK. He is the winner of the national Zahari Zograf award (2018) and has had numerous solo exhibitions in Bulgaria and abroad. He is a teacher at the Iliya Petrov National School of Fine Arts in Sofia. His works are part of the collections of the National Art Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and private collections in several countries.

The exhibition States includes works from the collection of the Dechko Uzunov Art Gallery, a branch of the Sofia City Art Gallery, and from the studio of Dinko Stoev.