Here’s an idea: Find museums with unusual architecture and present shows in them occupying no more than a humble corner. Who other than Nedko Solakov would take on such a self-deprecating enterprise? Staging exhibitions in kooky locations like ceilings and cloakrooms, the Bulgarian artist has always satirized the conventions of the art world, centering himself as the object of playful mockery. In his latest show, he takes on the curved architecture of Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI, where his work is perched atop a sinuous staircase at its entrance.
On the wall, the artist has written a fictional history of the installation, inscribing the humorous tale by hand. In his telling, there were plans for a grand museum exhibition; paintings, all large-scale, were ready, but then, “out of the blue,” a disinterested public spurred the show’s cancellation. As a consolation, the museum provided this secondary space to hang twenty or so small replicas of the original works. Speaking amongst themselves, the downsized duplicates hope that their place in the “miserable exhibition” is only temporary, and send well wishes to the absent artworks from whence they came.
This alternative exhibition presents the eclectic repertory we have grown familiar with in Solakov’s work. Within his medley of illustrations, we see a brilliant half-moon illuminating the night, a man’s silhouette beside Solakov’s script, and a sword-bearing figure on a pedestal, all satirized in small dimensions. Expanding the pastiche are depictions of a cloud-speckled sky, an umber pyramid, and the legs of a woman wearing bright red shoes.
The visual effect is like a colorful miniature flea market, or the impromptu show of a street painter, in any case something kitsch, incongruous with the elegance of its environment. Sometimes, however, the irony is restrained: A postscript in the exhibition text references the ongoing war in Ukraine, and we immediately find ourselves transported back to bitter contemporary reality.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
— Giorgio Verzotti