SACRED HISTORIES AND FANTASTIC LANDSCAPES

Where: Bulgarian Culture Institute - Berlin, 114-115 Leipziger Strasse

When: 16 December 2025 – 31 January 2026

Curator: Olympia Daniel

A kaleidoscopic impression of Nativity, one of the most important, poignant and symbolically rich themes in Christianity: Sacred Histories and Fantastic Landscapes, the new project of Sofia Press Art Gallery, brings together three Bulgarian artists with rather different nature. The exhibition was designed specifically for the Bulgarian Culture Institute – Berlin.

Stanimir Zhelev, drawing

Stanimir Zhelev's icons and religious drawings focus on details and human emotion, carefully capturing each gesture. The large-size painting "Between Two Epochs / Yet Another Nativity" by Andrey Daniel recreates the event in a rich, fantastical landscape, with playing shadows and lights, in an atmosphere that is both joyful and solemn. Atanas Atanasov demonstrates how the art canons and traditions blend into individual vision. His works reveal the Nativity's mystical and spiritual side, and the fantastic landscapes that often accompany the Biblical scenes underline the connection between earthly and divine.

Stanimir Zhelev, Nativity

The exhibition aims to start a deep dialogue with Europe's classical heritage. Between the 13th and 18th centuries, European artists would paint often Nativity and other Biblical scenes, yet the great majority of them had never visited the Middle East where these events unfolded. As a result, they inevitably created fantastical, extravagant landscapes that followed their own logic. Stanimir Zhelev, Andrey Daniel and Atanas Atanasov not only comment on the conventions and laws of religious art, but continue the tradition of imagined geography, using modern methods to create places that are both sacred and fantastic.

Atanas Atanasov, Nativity

Atanas Atanasov