The exhibition includes 22 works by Bulgarian artists from the inventory of the Sofia City Art Gallery, among who: Aneta Drugusanu, Boryana Rossa & Oleg Mavromatti, Mariela Gemisheva, Sevda Chkutova, Vaska Emanuilova, and others, and covers a broad time range. The selection presents the use of the female image in Bulgarian art from the second half of the 20th century to the present day and highlights atypical roles, such as its ideological use in art after 1950. At the same time, it presents woman as a creator and illustrates the reversal of the traditional positions of the (male) artist – (female) model.

In Bulgarian art, the female image as a symbol of mourning, resistance, and resilience was actively present before the Second World War. The figure of the grieving mother is one of the most common metaphors for reflecting on world revolutions and their human cost. The majority of artists from the Society of New Artists, including Vaska Emanuilova, worked with this aspect of the female figure in their work, which was already burdened with a new social mission.

During the first decades of socialism (1950s–1960s), the synthesis between folk tradition and the influence of the School of Paris was expressed in a politically verified language that derived its themes and subjects from the classics and the Christian tradition. “The mother” became an emblem for memory and traumatic historical events, but also for the new social role of women, which assigned her new functions until then intrinsic to men. In her famous essay “Women’s Time” (1993), Julia Kristeva describes the reaction to the traditional exclusion of women from power as the formation of a female counterforce and shows cases of women admitted to power systems and empowered by obtaining “male” status.

As a result of active work with the biography of Vaska Emanuilova, the exhibition presents the socialist woman as an active participant in the socio-political processes of the later 20th century and focuses on the work of artists – both male and female – with the female image in its anti-erotic and anti-aesthetic aspect. Vaska Emanuilova worked almost exclusively with female models, and most of her works are dedicated to a female archetype detached from the context of time (Shepherdess, Herdswoman, Rest, and others). In the exhibition, her view is supplemented with examples of women as equal participants in the building of socialism in the works of Stoyan Venev, Vera Lukova, Stoyan Sotirov, and other artists of her generation.

A certain update on the theme is offered with three contemporary positions from the inventory of the Sofia City Art Museum. Out of Myself by Mariela Gemisheva and Robot, Revolution, Onanism! by Boryana Rossa and Oleg Mavromatti are emblematic examples of this widely represented theme in contemporary Bulgarian art, which the exhibition at the Vaska Emanuilova Gallery does not pretend to exhaust.

The exhibition is curated by Galina Dekova and Galina Dimitrova.