Ivan Georgiev - Rembrandt

Ivan Georgiev-Rembrandt is a name known mostly to specialists and collectors. However, his pictorial heritage is an exceptional phenomenon in the history of Bulgarian art. Until 10-15 years ago, his hundreds of oil canvases, drawings and watercolors were away from the public eye. The reasons? Perhaps the regime that declared as formalism everything that did not correspond to the understanding of socialist realism.

Ivan Georgiev (1938-1994) was a talented student at the Art High School. Probably even then, because of his unique ability to convey nature, he received the artistic nickname Rembrandt. As a brilliant student at the academy, he won the opportunity to specialize in Germany. He was later described by his few close friends as extremely erudite and knowledgeable about processes in Western art. This is also reflected in the plastic searches in the field of his own painting.

Having slowly and gradually passed the path from realistic painting (portrait, landscape, still life) to pure abstraction, he is distinguished by his deeply thought-out and emotionally saturated compositions. It is a solitary development, an introspection through painting, dramatically bursting into complex and contrasting color relationships.

Svetla Petkova