↳ Exhibitions

Let Them Draw III at SARIEV Gallery

March 17, 2021

Artists: Alec Finlay, Galina Dimitrova, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Mariana Vassileva, Sevda Semer, Vlad Nancă

Exhibition title: Let Them Draw III

Curated by: Vesselina Sarieva and Pravdoliub Ivanov

Venue: SARIEV Gallery, Plovidv, Bulgaria

Date: February 12 – March 31, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and SARIEV Contemporary, Plovidv

A person attempts to fly a homemade aircraft. Draws the flight patterns of birds, drafts singular aircrafts of variable geometry. Runs across utopian sunlit glades, flapping wings made of slats and cloth. This is Boris Denev*, a Bulgarian artist (1883 – 1969). Denev’s little known passion, his drawings and aircraft projects, proved an inspiration to curators Vesselina Sarieva and Pravdoliub Ivanov for the third edition of the exhibition Let Them Draw III in Sariev Gallery, Plovdiv. Passion, experimentation, impulse, vulnerability, assumption, expression, arcane language, traces – these are the means of drawing presented by the exhibition.

Sevda Semer assembles a puzzle of broken thoughts, emotions and phrases, while carefully examining their traces upon sheets of paper.

With the levity of a flâneur, Alec Finlay draws up his own texts on pages of books he carries along on his lonely mountain trips, while in search of nature’s domain within himself.

Vlad Nancă shows us a word in an unknown language written in metallic houseplant stands. The flowers, however, will utter it in a different manner.

Galina Dimitrova weaves everyday attires from the erotic fibres of the “Naked Truth” and places them on a wash-line that is large enough to accommodate the birds.

Disarmingly sincere, Hortensia Mi Kafchin takes us through the psychedelic secret places of modern-day city narratives, dreams and utopias.

The singed hands in the work of Mariana Vassileva attentively hold a fragile luminous line as a sign of hope for an insight and a future.

In line with the previous two editions, Let Them Draw I (2016) and Let Them Draw II (2017), the curators of the present exhibition attempt to investigate the bounds of our established notions of drawing and expand them with the aid of artists and the singular aircrafts of their own making.

The exhibition Let Them Draw III will take place between February 12, 2021 and March 31, 2021 in Sariev Gallery, Plovdiv. It will present artworks of authors Alec Finlay (Edinburgh), Galina Dimitrova (Düsseldorf, Bobov Dol), Hortensia Mi Kafchin (Berlin), Mariana Vassileva (Berlin), Sevda Semer (Sofia) and Vlad Nancă (Bucharest).

*The exhibition will present Tsvetan Tsankov’s book Boris Denev and Aviation, available thanks to the Union of Bulgarian Artists. Although Denev’s original drawings of aircrafts from 1910 are not immediately available, we may mentally include them in favor of the situation created for the present exhibition.

Let Them Draw III, 2021, exhibition view, SARIEV Gallery, Plovidv

Galina Dimitrova, The naked truth, 2020, installation, permanent marker on textiles and foil, 230×200 cm

Vlad Nancă, Signs (the separation of modernism from functionalism), 2018, Fragment, an installation consisting of 6 welded iron designs, 6 iron rings, 6 plant pots and plants