The Little Ones – Nedko Solakov

Institute of Contemporary Art - Sofia / 26.02.2026 – 3.05.2026

The Institute of Contemporary Art presents "The Little Ones" (2025-2026), new works by Nedko Solakov. The artist, one of the founders of ICA—Sofia, returns to the gallery created thanks to his generosity. “The Little Ones” is a series of paintings—a conceptual approach characteristic of Nedko Solakov, one of the most famous artists today, who has participated in emblematic contemporary art forums such as Documenta – twice (2007, 2012) and the Venice Biennale – six times (1993, 1995, 1999 – representing Bulgaria, 2001, 2003, 2007, when he received one of the awards for his participation in the main project). The current exhibition further confirms his unique ability to combine different types of visual language in the form of polysemantic stories, based on deeply personal experiences of aggressions engendered by socio-political reality. At the exhibition’s core stands the rich, nuanced, enticing pictorial surface of the seven canvases – a "feast for the eye," as art historians of the past liked to say. The blazing red, the flowing gray, the bottomless black, the cold "flesh," the halftones and bright flashes are the matter within which the tiny silhouettes and the texts describing their conditions exist. Each one of the seven pictorial universes is a small emotional story, familiar and understandable to everyone: the many frustrations, including political ones, as well as the few satisfactions from art and nature, calming, balancing depression, achieving nirvana, formulated as disappearance. The entirety of ordinary human life, told and shown on the canvases in a sequence determined by the author. Yet this would not be Nedko Solakov, master of conceptual paradoxes, if the painting exhibition did not also include ten drawings, in two cycles of sketches of pairs of nude female bodies. Drawn from life and displayed alongside the self-referential text linking them to one of the paintings, they tell another gentle, human, artistic story called “20 Years.” Nedko Solakov’s “The Little Ones” not only questions the prevailing world order, but also offers a subtle ironic commentary on the consolation of escapism, possible for artists only if they are sufficiently wise.