Boyadzhiev’s works are in many ways connected to theories, theorists, idols and ideologies. The theme is the handling and impact of worldviews, dogmas and other entities of intellectual life against the concrete background of the “post-totalitarian vacuum” ( Boyadzhiev) in Eastern Europe. Lychezar Boyadzhiev has the spirit, the humour, and the necessary distance to approach such sensitive subjects without leaving behind a bland aftertaste.
The viewer experiences a scenario of “thinking pictures” that refresh the mind and the senses. Bojadshiev works with installations, collages, and drawings, using all media suitable for him to convey confrontations with objects. The five installations on display are surprisingly simple and transparent, without being superficial and one-dimensional. We witness strange happenings in the work “Philosophical Cemetery”. Indeed, the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of our heritage themselves can be found here in respectable coffins.
Meaningful and dead, like “ideas decaying in bibliotheques” (Boyadzhiev), almost all of them are in the midst of a sombre rendezvous. Another work, which gave the exhibition its name, cheerfully and rigorously demonstrates a similar process with entirely different omens. In the installation “Consolidation of Faith” the holy family receives an unexpected addition. The artist’s thesis of the twins Christ N. and Christ H. was created against the background of the increasing spread of Orthodox Christian dogma in Bulgaria and opens a new playful approach to or way out of faith.
The works stand independently of one another, diverse tones are struck. Bojadshiev is concerned with discourse, with free thinking in theoretical space, not with removing it. His works foreground contexts of meaning that arise associatively more than material, colour and form.
After numerous exhibitions and publications abroad, primarily in the USA, the artist Lytschesar Bojadshiev, born in 1957, is exhibiting his work in Germany for the first time. The exhibition is accompanied by a 40-page catalogue in which all the works shown are illustrated, at a price of 15,- DM.