In 2006, the Sofia City Art Gallery presented Genko Genkov with an exhibition featuring works created mostly over the period between 2002 and 2006. This was the artist’s last solo exhibition. Seventeen years later, the gallery team has come up with a couple of exhibitions commemorating the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birth, at the mothership and one of its branches, namely the Dechko Uzunov Gallery, respectively. The exhibitions at the two venues allow viewers to get acquainted with various aspects of the artist’s work.
The SCAG retrospective features more than a hundred works by Genko Genkov created over the period between 1949 and 2005. His artistic output includes a huge number of oil on canvas and fiberboard paintings, and also works on paper where the artist perfected his watercolour technique, complemented by the use of gouache, pastel, printing inks and pigments, as well as by various tools and techniques to boost colour contrast and vibrancy. The artist also experimented in the field of graphic art and sporadically in sculpture, yet oil painting remained at the centre of his art. His painting was constantly evolving, changing in terms of colour use, form and intensity.
Genko Genkov painted very few still lifes, nude bodies, portraits of family and friends, or individuals he was impressed by. He would often take a closer look at himself through the years, leaving us various self-portraits as a result. The artist created countless landscapes that are not so much realistic as visionary, sometimes solidly composed, other times fiercely expressive, oftentimes melancholic, created using both the most distinguishable vibrant palette and subtle colour combinations.
