The Little Ones

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.

Iara Bоubnova, curator

NEDKO SOLAKOV 

Since the early 1990s, Nedko Solakov (b. 1957, Cherven Bryag, Bulgaria; lives in Sofia) has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US. His work was featured in Aperto’93 (Venice Biennial); the 48th, 49th, 50th and 52nd Venice Biennial; the 3rd, 4th and 9th Istanbul Biennial; São Paulo’94; Manifesta 1, Rotterdam; the 2nd and 4th Gwangju Biennial; the 5th Lyon Biennial; Sonsbeek 9, Arnhem; the 4th and 5th Cetinje Biennial; the 1st Lodz Biennial; the 7th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates; the 3rd Tirana Biennial; the 2nd Seville Biennial; the 2nd Moscow Biennial; documenta 12; 16th Sydney Biennial; Prospect 1, New Orleans Biennial; Singapore Biennial 2011; dOCUMENTA (13); Kathmandu Triennale; 1st Riga International Biennial for Contemporary Art and Lahore Biennale 2. He had solo shows at Museu do Chiado, Lisbon; Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Kunsthaus Zurich; Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli; Sofia City Art Gallery; Galleria Borghese, Rome; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; BOZAR, Brussels; ICA Sofia; La Panacee, Montpellier; Mudam Luxembourg; Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean; MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome; Upper Belvedere, Vienna; The Palace-National Art Gallery, Sofia; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Museum of Contemporary Arts (MACS), Grand-Hornu, and Kunst Museum Winterthur. In 2003-2005 an extensive mid-career "A 12 1/3 (and even more) Year Survey" was presented at Casino Luxembourg, Rooseum Malmoe and O.K Centrum Linz, and in 2008-2009 the “Emotions” solo project was exhibited at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, and Institut Mathildenhoehe, Darmstadt. In 2011-2012 his retrospective “All in Order, with Exceptions” was presented at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Fondazione Galleria Civica Trento (“All in (My) Order, with Exceptions”), S.M.A.K., Ghent and Fundação de Serralves, Porto. His works belong to more than fifty international museums and public collections, among them MoMA New York, Tate Modern, London and Center Pompidou, Paris. 

www.nedkosolakov.net

In the photo: "A Little One #3" from the exhibition "The Little Ones" (2025-2026) by Nedko Solakov. Photo: Dimitar Solakov.