RASSIM®’s solo exhibition at Vaska Emanouilova Gallery presents the development of the artist’s concept of art, showing works from different series and periods of his creative career. His earlier works are part of the contemporary art collection of the Sofia City Art Gallery. Placed alongside Vaska Emanouilova’s sculptures, RASSIM®’s works create invisible spatial and historical connections in terms of the interest in the human body, the search for the natural material, and classic art.

RASSIM® is an artist known to the audience since the 1990s as an active participant in the contemporary Bulgarian art scene. He is one of the artists having introduced the language of performance and body art in Bulgarian art by turning his own body into an instrument of creativity. The earlier works of the artist bear the marks of the social and cultural context of transformation of society, full of psychological contrasts and will for change. Although he creates contemporary works, over the years RASSIM® has revealed a deeply classic attitude towards art beyond the relativity of meanings and the games of postmodernism. In his more recent works, he has returned to the canvas and painting as a field for creating “masterpieces” and works essential to the history of art. The artist changed the concept of the artist signature, painting with his own urine and later with oil, a material that carries nature’s richness and cumulative “memory”. RASSIM® sees the artist’s DNA as the trace of the individual handwriting as well as the thread connecting the author to the ancestral and land memory. The relationship with nature and the interest in life as a cosmic force somehow place RASSIM® in a tradition of artistic exploration in Bulgarian art history – the tradition of interest in the beginnings and the essence of existence.

Within the exhibition, there will be a presentation of RASSIM®’s catalogue Exbodytion, published by Gallery ONE.

The exhibition is realized in cooperation with Gallery ONE.
Curator: Vladiya Mihaylova