“Dear friends,
On the eve of the birthday of the artist Rafael Mihaylov, we are about to open the exhibition, with which we will celebrate the 125th anniversary of his birth – one of the significant and prominent figures in Bulgarian painting of the 20th century. On March 12 at 5:30 p.m., the exhibition “Moments. 125 Years of the Birth of Rafael Mihaylov” will be officially opened.
The exhibition will present nearly 80 works from the collections of the Boris Denev Art Gallery, City Art Gallery – Plovdiv, Sofia City Art Gallery, Art Gallery – Dobrich, Burgas Art Gallery “Petko Zagorski”, Art Gallery – Ruse, Art Gallery “Dimitar Dobrovich”, Art Gallery “Nikola Marinov”, as well as from private collections.
Rafael Mihaylov was born on March 15, 1901 in Tarnovo, into a large family of a priest, and was orphaned at an early age. Before entering the Academy of Arts, he participated in the theater troupe of Kina Gerdzhikova in Plovdiv — an experience that left lasting marks on his sensitivity and visual world. In the period 1924–1928, he was a student at the Academy, where he studied with Ivan Angelov and Haralampi Tachev, but was expelled due to accusations of “anti-academic painting”. His rights were restored in 1933, after his works attracted the attention of the Minister of Public Education. In 1934, he completed his education in the studio of Dechko Uzunov. He worked as a teacher in various cities of the country, and after World War II he settled in Sofia.
Participation in a number of joint art exhibitions confirms the artist’s independently constructed pictorial language, which assigns him a lasting and significant place both in the cultural memory of Veliko Tarnovo and in the national artistic context. The presented works form a semantic and emotional parallel with his poetry collection “Moments”, published in 1967 and aroused the interest of the literary and cultural community. The symbiosis between the brush and the pen rediscovers the lyrical and sensitive nature of the artist, whose spiritualized, lyrically saturated paintings reflect the visible and invisible world around us.
We are waiting for you!”
