Nedko Solakov

08 October 2011 - 05 February 2012

© Nedko Solakov Red, 2005 courtesy Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento.

NEDKO SOLAKOV
All In (My) Order With Exceptions
8 October, 2011 – 5 February, 2012

All in (My) Order, with Exceptions is the first retrospective exhibition held within an Italian public institution of Nedko Solakov (b.1957 in Cherven Briag, Bulgaria), one of the most prominent artists of his generation. The exhibition showcases a selection of 31 works (more than one for each year, from 1981 to 2011) and is the most comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the artist to date. The exhibition, which examines the main features of the artist’s research, is the result of the collaboration of the Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento with three among the most prestigious contemporary art museums in Europe: Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, S.M.A.K., Ghent and Museu Serralves, Porto. Through a disarming, ironic and poetic artistic language, Solakov lays bare the conventions of everyday life and reflects upon the mechanisms of thought, the relation between individual and collective history, and between reality and imagination.
The collaboration of the Fondazione Galleria Civica di Trento with the Ikon Gallery of Birmingham, the S.M.A.K. of Ghent and the Museu Serralves of Porto, resulted in a wide-ranging survey exhibition which develops, within the four venues, around different works. While in Birmingham, Ghent and Porto the relevant curators have autonomously drawn on the artist’s archives and gathered the three exhibition under the title All in Order, with Exceptions, as regards Trento, the artist has selected the single works himself from all the works not selected by the previous curators, showing an intimate and personal approach. Hence the slightly different exhibition’s title: All in (My) Order, with Exceptions. The works on display – drawings and watercolours on paper, paintings on canvas, wall interventions, texts, mosaics, photographs, videos, site-specific installations and projects expressly realized for the venue in Trento – are incorporated within a continuous narration, performed by the artist on the walls of the Fondazione, that, with reference to the traditional Trento’s urbis picta, is developed through drawings and texts and that connects the works each other running through the whole exhibition space. The exhibition is a representation of the artist’s life, an autobiography we have the privilege of walking in, a deeply engaging life story. The complexity and the size of the artist’s practice may be also viewed browsing through the archive expressly realized for the exhibition (The Folders, 2011), which showcases hundreds of works, alongside with several meaningful occurrences in the artist’s life, related to each year of his thirty-year long career. The exhibition will feature the first retrospective catalogue dedicated to Solakov, published by Hatje Cantz.

www.fondazionegalleriacivica.tn.it