Everyone has their own comfort zone which would sometimes be associated with positive feelings and in other instances with the loneliness, anger, discontent, the sense of guilt or anxiety, etc. In the exhibition of Alexander Gerginov, the comfort zones are those implicit personal altars where hope and faith intertwine with obsession and fear of allowing freedom in life and letting go of the things which are leaving us.

The exhibition features photographs, objects and installations, each of which is a form of confiding in one’s own self and in others. The works are accompanied by a short text, which relates a personal story but also addresses the audience. The places and images that inspire the artist spread from the fields of his hometown Elin Pelin all the way to the largest church dedicated to Virgin Mary in Rome, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Part of them are real, others are imaginary or metaphorical, as the Cambodian temple shown in the Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood for Love, where people can go and tell their deepest secrets in hollows in the wall and then seal them forever. Created of light materials, lying on the borderline of kitsch, and charged with a dose of irony for the sentimentality, the works test the spectators’ “taste” and ideas of “beautiful” and “ugly”. Through the use of shining fabrics, cement, and photos taken with a phone, the artist seeks to find authenticity and resemblance to life rather than aesthetic perfection.  The hair used as a material in the exhibition, as well as the markedly personal attitude of the artist, are related to the common idea of a human world, of a “spiritual” DNA which all people share and which is not a matter of mysticism but of attention to the personal space (the comfort zone, the individual altar) of each one of us.

Alexander Gerginov (born 1980) lives and works in Sofia. He graduated in Fashion from the National Academy of Art, where in 2015 he defended a PhD thesis on the history of fashion illustration in Bulgaria. He teaches fashion and develops his own brand HAM&EGGS. Along with that, he has also other artistic participations; he creates mostly drawings and paintings, and has had four solo exhibitions shown in the Pistolet Gallery in the period from 2008 to 2011. The artist has participated in various group exhibitions in Sofia, Austria, Prague, such as the Third International Biennial for Young Art in Moscow (2012) and the exhibition They Will Remember Us in the Future within the Sofia Queer Forum – Sweet Union 2015, Academy Gallery, National Academy of Art (2015).