THE GARDEN OF HEAVENLY DELIGHTS
Exhibition by Yasen Zgurovski
Little Bird Place
(March 19 – May 20)
Curators: Teodora Konstantinova and Radoslav Mehandzhiyski (Art & Culture Today)
Yasen Zgurovsky's exhibition "The Garden of Heavenly Delights" resembles a humorous and deliberately disordered contemporary mythology of fictional Gods. Hybrid beings uniting the flesh and morals of man and nature. Tempted by the pop culture and aesthetics of kitsch, Yasen Zgurovski's garden is in indirect correspondence with Hieronymus Bosch's epic moralizing artwork “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1504) commenting on the absurdity of many moral codes still functioning.
Myths have a legitimate role in our culture, without their content being verifiable. They are narrative stories whose symbolism is a matter of conjecture. Today, we are looking for hope and meaning in the mythologies of past cultures and our own "legitimizing stories" seem to inhabit the spaces of politics, the media and respond to social tensions. In this context, Yasen Zgurovski's exhibition becomes a revelation woven of moral anecdotes that free us from the stiffness of conventional perceptions and lead us to an open reading of a number of cliches related to pop culture, gay culture, consumers’passions, the divine and natural rules.
We fall into a garden that reveals a dazzling spectacle of triumphant hybrid deities at rest, blissfully devoted to their pleasures, dreams, addictions and colorful experiences - with themselves and with others… The released dance of nature… This garden is not secret, it is open to anyone who dares to deploy a kaleidoscope of their desires.
This volatile provocation is clothed in the characteristic and long conceived by the artist aesthetics of kitsch, which is a rare phenomenon in the Bulgarian artistic life. When we talk about kitsch in art, the word is devoid of the original negative connotation that is hidden in everyday language. It is a well-established aesthetic category, which has become a means of ascending over triviality, of joking, yet nefarious and vivid, resentment against retrogressive thinking.
Read more
