The exhibition Dechko Uzunov. Figural Motifs of Bulgarian Maidens and Brides has the goal of popularizing the creative legacy of the great Bulgarian artist and is part of the Heritage Programme of the Dechko Uzunov Gallery, a branch of the Sofia City Art Museum. The current exposition opens in late February, the month of Dechko Uzunov’s birth, and presents the opportunity to see his oil paintings and watercolours in the institution’s inventory with Bulgarian girls and young women as their subject.
The curator of the exhibition this year, at the invitation of the gallery, is Prof. Chavdar Popov. In his text for the exhibition, he writes, “In the second half of the 1960s, as well as in the 1970s, Dechko Uzunov was not the only Bulgarian artist who developed the figural motifs of the woman, the maiden, the bride, and the Bulgarian woman. In different conceptual and thematic aspects (ethno-psychological types, motherhood, fertility, the resilience of national traditions, etc.), such motifs, freed from the plot/narrative principle and brought to the level of fixed artistic formulas, are found in the work of other Bulgarian artists.
“Despite this, however, in his oil paintings, watercolours, and pastels, Dechko Uzunov individually expresses the best qualities of his artistic mastery and fully demonstrates the special features of his talent. He directs his attention to certain archetypes characteristic of the “eternal” antinomy between “native” and “foreign,” which marked a significant segment of the trends and directions in our art after the Liberation [from Ottoman rule]. The “maidens” gave the artist exceptionally rich possibilities to fully display the beauty of the magnificence of his lines and his palette, liberated from narrow-minded thematism or illustrative narrative.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a brochure in two languages.