OPENING HOURS: Tue – Sun 9.00 – 13.00; 14.00 – 18.00; Mon – closed

Stefan Katsarov “Painting and Drawing”

3 – 27 April , 2025
Opening: April 3, 2025, 6:00 PM

Ruse painter Stefan Katsarov is opening a large solo exhibition at the Art Gallery – Ruse. The maestro, who is one of the brightest representatives of the famous Ruse painting school in the past, is showing works created over the past 15 years.

The exhibition also includes works from galleries in Ruse, Lovech, Veliko Tarnovo, Pleven, Kardzhali, and more.

Stefan Katsarov is a landscape artist who’s really got it going on. He travels around Bulgaria to find his subjects. He’ll walk for hours to get to a spot, like the coast of Balchik and Sozopol, the Danube bank near Brushlen, Oryahovo, Mechka, the Ruse Lomove, the Struma and Mesta rivers.

These landscapes are always full of light and space. The bright, bold colors and clear lines are faced with Impressionism and Abstraction. They’re captivating and take you beyond what you can see, into the world of emotion. The paintings capture a moment that the author has discovered in the state of nature.

Along with the paintings in the exhibition, Stefan Katsarov also shows his drawings. Drawings are the artist’s other passion. They started out as preparation for the landscapes, but they’re really stand-alone pieces. The main genre is again the landscape, but they’re done in ink and watercolor. Among them is a series of his works that haven’t been shown before. He made them after his visit to China in the 1990s. Katsarov has been very interested in Chinese and Japanese painting and printmaking techniques lately, and you can see bits of them in his style.

Katsarov, a plein air artist, describes his style as modern realism. His landscapes aren’t just a copy of what he sees, but a way for him to generalize and interpret it in his own style.

 

“For me, landscape is a philosophical attitude towards nature and its optimistic and tragic states. These states are eternal and will remain eternal.”

Stefan Katsarov

(Conversation with V. Karadjova, 2013)

 

Stefan Katsarov was born in Sofia. He graduated from the Academy of Arts in 1967 under Prof. Panayot Panayotov. He’s been the director of the Art Gallery – Ruse for over twenty years. He was also the creative secretary of the Ruse artists’ group. He puts on his own exhibitions in different cities around the country. His greatest passion is travel, creative trips, and open-air exhibitions, which he draws inspiration from. He takes part in a bunch of open-air exhibitions in our country and in other countries, like the former Czechoslovakia, Italy, Russia, Portugal, China, and France.