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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". |
