Luchezar Boyadjiev (1957) was born in Sofia, where he lives and works. He graduated in History of Art from the National Art Academy in Sofia in 1980. He continued his artistic education while living in New York City, USA in the 1980s. He began his artistic career after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In his work, he engages with a personal interpretation of social processes, with the interaction between private and public, with urban visuality and today's world split between utopia and anti-utopia. His media are installation, photography, drawing, objects, text, video and performative lectures.
In 2018, the retrospective exhibition “Luchezar Boyadjiev. Sic transit media mundi /The Present is Too Short and Rather Tight/” is organized at the City Art Gallery in Sofia. For the exhibition, the artist is awarded the 2018 Sofia Municipality Award for outstanding achievements in the field of culture (visual art). In 2020, his retrospective exhibition “Luchezar Boyadjiev. Re-building the World of Images. 1991-2019” is organized at the MOMus Contemporary in Thessaloniki, Greece. In 2023, his solo exhibitions include: “Urban Daydreaming” at ICA-Gallery and “Public Scale, Private Size” at Structura Gallery, both in Sofia. In 2022 the artist participated in the Manifesta 14 Nomadic Biennial in Prishtina, Kosovo; and in 2023 in the 4th Autostrada Biennial in Prizren, Kosovo.
Luchezar Boyadjiev is one of the most internationally visible contemporary artists from Bulgaria. Among his recent exhibitions are “Dystopian Cozy” at Sariev Contemporary, Plovdiv (solo), and the group exhibitions “The Influencing Machine”, 2022-MCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw and 2019-Nikodim Gallery, Bucharest; in 2017 “Economize! On the Relationship of Art and Economy”, as well as “Symptoms of Society”, Guangdong (Guangzhou) Museum of Art and Zhejiang (Hangzhou) Museum of Art, China; in 2016 “Cold Wind from the Balkans”, PERA Museum, Istanbul; “Low Budget Utopias”, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; in 2015 “Grammar of Freedom”, MCA Garage, Moscow, “Inside Out”, City Gallery, Ljubljana, and “Art for Change 1985-2015”, City Art Gallery, Sofia; in 2014 “Disconsent” at the Ancient Bath, Plovdiv; in 2013 “Economics in Art”, MOCAK, Cracow, Poland; in 2012 “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times”, 1st Biennial, Kiev, and “The Eye Never Sees Itself”, 2nd Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg, Russia; and in 2011 “The Global Contemporary”, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany as well as many others.
The artist was awarded the Grand Prix for his participation in the exhibition “Onufri'98. Permanent Instability” at the National Gallery of Art, Tirana, Albania; and the Art Criticism Award of the UBA (Union of Bulgarian Artists) for 1989.
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Luchezar Boyadjiev belongs to that first generation of artists who laid the groundwork for Bulgaria’s contemporary art scene during the mid-1980s. Trained as an art historian and theorist, Boyadjiev set out to create art that questions traditional symbols of power and religion as well as the social conditions in his home country with respect to global developments and the virtual world. His analysis of the situation in the Balkans as an interim zone or Lacanian “Other” moved him to problematize the notion of transparency in the region in his catalogue text for the 3rd Istanbul Biennial in 1992, which was the first in which Bulgarian artists participated. Ever since, Boyadjiev’s work has taken up ironically critical stances toward history and social deployment.
His works from the 1990s revolve around religious symbols and beliefs, which the artist deconstructs in a variety of installations. “Fortification of Faith” from 1991, for instance, tells the story of Jesus and his twin brother—thereby forming links with Bulgarian traditions and iconography. In his drawing series “Philosophical Cemetery” from 1992, Boyadjiev attributes coffins to different intellectuals and creates mythical symbols for those who influenced democratic as well as totalitarian modes of thinking. Boyadjiev also frequently constructs utopias out of the various belief systems, an undertaking that—especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall—led individuals to questioning their identities in search for a possible future. The latter is manifested in the photographic project based on the installation “Chairs and Symbols. A Project for Peaceful Co-identification” (1995–2001), a series of eleven color photographs in which constellations of red and black chairs are deployed in conference rooms to forms a cross, a sickle or a swastika, referring to media gatherings by denoting the agency of ideology as such.
Some recent works deal with changing urban structures in a globalized world, visualizing images and text inscribed by the artist into culturally significant sites. Here, Boyadjiev addresses the notion of billboards and other advertising in public space as present-day icons, surrogates for formerly religious beliefs. The advent of the Internet has also provided a means by which the artist has critically altered spatial paradigms: these are stripped of their ideological or monumental significance, but still remain as sites that reflect past, present and personal forms of belonging. – Walter Seidl