Capacity. Ivaylo Avramov. Sculpture Exhibition
9 March – 16 April 2023
This sculpture exhibition featuring works by Ivaylo Avramov is the first of a series of interventions designed for the spaces of public art galleries throughout the country launched by the artist in 2017. The project focuses on an architectural element, namely the wall between two exhibition halls of the Vaska Emanuilova Gallery, which was also subject to previous interventions. Its initial transformation was done by Simeon Simeonov in 2008 who turned it into a coloured inflatable volume for his exhibition Against Architecture, and in 2010 Cyril Kuzmanov broke down part of the wall to insert a glass prism in it for his exhibition Dead Head. Ivaylo Avramov’s work is a visually analytical as well as an experimental process primarily focused on the visibility, content, presence and value of material things. The project has three phases with architectural design parameters as given values at its starting point. The first intervention is designating the wall as an existential document or a template for the interpretation to follow. The artist tasks himself with studying architectural volume from the vantage point of its gravitational and material transformation. The next phase of the experiment concerns notions such as capacity and volume and focuses on changing the gravitational position of the element, i. e. on moving it from one point in space to another. During the third phase, the object is present in a decomposed form, like raw material. The exhibition presents the three phases as three functional manifestations of the architectural element’s substance and volume. The conclusion the viewer is encouraged to reach is that the transformation process can affect the wall’s position, function, building material and shape, yet it cannot change the volume of its capacity. Avramov’s work is inspired by 1960’s and 1970’s Western art movements minimalism and Arte Povera, which he uses to develop, with grammatical precision, a visual field of his own where the artist’s presence is not a decisive factor. Matter, by contrast, is given free rein.