“Sex, eroticism, and love are aspects of the same phenomenon, an expression of what we call life.” If we have a glimpse into the art world, we will doubtlessly recognize these three aspects in the works of hundreds of authors, musicians, film makers, playwrights, and visual artists. Yet their presence in artworks by Bulgarian artists is disturbingly limited. Stoyan Venev is one of those few artists whose artworks reveal a more sustainable presence of eroticism (?). It is this legacy of his that is presented by the exhibition Stoyan Venev’s Erotic Artwork Through the Eyes of Bogomil Raynov.

In the early 1960’s, when Bogomil Raynov came back to Bulgaria, he set about writing a monograph about artist Stoyan Venev. Numerous meetings between the two evolved into an enduring friendship over the course of which the artist confided to the author his long-hidden passion, namely his lasting interest in eroticism. The naked, desire-ridden human body, passion between man and woman found their way into Stoyan Venev’s art, which B. Raynov showed vivid interest in, buying his friend’s works for decades. Those are dozens of sheets done in watercolor, India ink and pencil, which stayed undisclosed in his personal archive for a long time. After the author’s death, the artworks ended up in private collections, and now a considerable part of them can be seen in the original at this exhibition.

The public is familiar with the artist’s vibrant paintings and his inimitable sense of humor revealed by numerous satirical drawings mocking the powers that be, church authority, people’s primal sexual instinct. The exhibits displayed at the Vaska Emanouilova Gallery feature characters that were stripped of their clothing. Characters who have given in to lust and lasciviousness. Images that are part of Stoyan Venev’s ‘art made in secret’, as defined by B. Raynov. Artworks kept a secret, which allow us, like no other artworks by a Bulgarian artist, not only to become aware of our sexual immaturity and raw primality, but also to recognize, through B. Raynov’s memories, the implications of the mechanisms of existence in our near past, which we never managed to come to terms with.

The exhibition is organized by the Vaska Emanouilova Gallery in partnership with the LIST Publishing House within the framework of the project ‘Beyond Puritanism: Concealed Drawings from Stoyan Venev’s Archive Through the Eyes of Bogomil Raynov’ with funding provided under the Cultural Program for the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2018 of the National Culture Fund.