The exhibition Maria Stolarova. Defended Aesthetics is part of the Generations Programme of the Dechko Uzunov Art Gallery, a branch of the Sofia City Art Gallery. 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Maria Stolarova (1925–2016), one of Dechko Uzunov’s students. On this occasion, the Sofia City Art Gallery and Dechko Uzunov Gallery are presenting an exhibition of paintings covering both her early works and her emblematic works from later periods.
Maria Stolarova had more than 30 solo exhibitions and dozens of participations in expositions abroad – in London, Berlin, Rome, Budapest, Prague, among others. She was a recipient of the order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, I and II class, and was awarded the title of Artist of Merit. Her solo exhibitions were covered on more than one occasion with articles in Izkustvo (‘Art’) magazine and various daily newspapers, which testifies to the interest of critics in her work. Her pieces attracted attention from the very first solo exhibition she organized in 1962, dedicated to the industrial landscape and the new factory forms. She was from the generation of artists who entered the artistic scene in the 1960s – a decade characterized by an upsurge in Bulgarian art, connected to a number of socio-cultural factors that influenced the establishment of new themes, genres, and approaches. In a creative sense, Maria Stolarova’s painting shows a number of analogies with the art of the 1930s, more so than with the so-called propaganda painting characteristic of the socialist period in which she had to create and defend her aesthetic views. Her industrial landscapes mark one of the most important stages in the development of Bulgarian painting – the first modern canvases with this theme, compositionally simple, with an emphasized constructive form and a synthetic colour palette applied as a glaze. In the 1970s, her work reached a mature stage of development, in which the three main genres in which she worked had emerged: industrial landscape, still life, and portraiture.
The collection of the Sofia City Art Gallery includes a number of important works by Maria Stolarova, created in the 1960s and 1970s, including: Industrial Landscape, the Portrait of Metodi Andonov and Mercia MacDermott, and the still life Bellflowers. With the support of the artist’s family, the present exhibition also presents her lesser-known early works, as well as the work Self-Portrait, created in the mid-1950s.