"...Gligor Stefanov create contextual, environmental installations
which may be included in what Rosalind Krauss generally refers to as a
extended field of sculpture's action, or as it is elsewhere called a
site-specific sculpture. In his case, it is sculpture derived from
natural materials pointing to the unique features of the place where
their are created or to the broader environment which influence their
characteristics by its total energy. In his usually two-dimensional
painting/sculpture objects, Gligor Stefanov uses straw which is
immersed in the essence of the local color. But, as with gold in
Byzantine icons, straw is for him also a metaphor of (sun) light and
an alchemic formula for the liberation of things material. His winged
objects hovering and rising towards the sky, or hardly touching the
ground in their transparency, are symbolic signs of the striving
towards absolute space: they denote space as a sphere, as a dome or
firmament which is the center of metaphysical unity. To enter his
environment is to come to know the accumulation of material and
spiritual energy inside it. According to Stefanov, it is equivalent to
a liturgical ritual, to the act of building a temple..."
From the
Macedonian catalogue of 93 Venice Biennale
Zoran Petrovski,
Director and
Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia
|
Gligor Stefanov
is a representative of the middle generation of Macedonian artists, who
now living in Canada. He graduated at the Belgrade Art Academy where he
also received his M.A. He has had 18 one-man exhibitions in Skopje,
Belgrade, Zagreb, Dublin, London and Venice. He has taken part in more
than 100 important group exhibitions in Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo,
Graz, Prague, Athens, Toulon, Dresden, Budapest, etc. He has been
awarded a number of prizes, one of which is the award of the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Skopje. From the very beginning of his artistic
activity, Stefanov abandoned medial and stylistic concreteness.
Following the rhythm of postmodernism, he has emphatically demonstrated
his affiliation to his own spiritual, geographic and cultural
environment. The mystical love and cultic attitude towards the natural
materials (straw, jute, cotton, grass, hay, wood, terra-cotta) was an
attempt to their pure state of existence (structure, color, smell,
density, texture, warmth). Stefanov's first sculptures-objects lay
within the context of the geo-ethnographic sensibility of the Macedonian
environment: they had a certain visual, but not spiritual closeness to
neodadaism or arte povera. In the subsequent development stage, the
artist concentrated on questions associated with space, using it as a
material for building unusual linear forms. Retaining his affinity for
natural materials, at his one-man exhibition in Belgrade (1985) he gave
his works clearly metaphoric and symbolic characteristics, which by
their names [Kites) pointed to his desire to move away from reality.
Moving in England in 1988,Stefanov demonstrated his intention to enter
metaphysical sphere. His object/environmental sculptures showing angels
of the highest order in angelic hierarchy SERAPHIM, CHERUBIM AND THRONE)
were executed in straw as the primary "sculptor's" material. Stefanov
attempted to give a concrete artistic body to the most abstract visions
from the Old and New Testaments through an allegory of light (gold, sun,
angel). His project for the 45th Venice Biennale is a kind of a
liturgical act under the sky as a dome, in the presence of "Seraphim"
and "Cherubim".
From the
Macedonian catalogue of the 93 Venice Biennale
Sonja
Abadzieva - Dimitrova,
Research Associate Curator,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje |
