Krassimir Terziev’s exhibition, “Late Night Talks with My Modern Ancestors”, approaches modernism not as a finished era but as a conversation that is far from over. The works, produced between 2017 and 2026, revisit key works of modernism. These references neither constitute a pantheon of artists nor a system of quotations. Terziev subjects inherited forms to new material conditions. Gold leaf disrupts non-objective simplicity; wood resists the grid form; heat bends minimalist geometry; pigment seeps through coarse fabric; and a moving camera transfers its impact from the body to architecture. The term “late night” in the exhibition’s title evokes an encounter where official histories end, absolutes dissolve, and precursors can be treated as challenging figures. In the context of the ecological crisis, technological mediation, and the political exhaustion of modernity, promises of universality are reevaluated.
iNVITATION
About the artist
Krassimir Terziev is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans a diversity of media, including video/film, photography, painting/drawing, and text, questioning the boundaries between reality and fiction, while exploring the manifold transitions and tensions between a globalized world, dominated by overwhelming multiplicity of symbolic imagery, and its material groundings in technological, physical and human ‘hardware’.
He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Sofia University (2012), where is lecturing since, and an MA degree in Painting from the National Academy of Arts, Sofia (1997), where he lectured from 2009 to 2016.
His work is part of the collections of Centre Pompidou/MNAM, Paris; Arteast 2000+ Collection, Moderna Galerija Ljubljana; Sofia City Art Gallery, Sofia; Art Collection Telekom, Bonn; Kunstsammlung HypoVereinsbank, Munich; Gaudenz B. Ruf Collection, Zurich/Vienna; Vladimir Illiev Collection, Sofia; Art Project Depot, Sofia; Dana and Georgi Voynov Collection, Sofia/Bucharest; among others.
Born 1969 in Dobrich, Bulgaria. Lives and works in Sofia. Member of the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia