Works on paper for the first time through a retrospective review presents the graphic and drawing oeuvre of one of the most important Macedonian sculptors, Petar Hadji Boshkov (Skopje 1928 – 2015). Drawing and graphics represent a significant segment of his sculptural oeuvre but are at the same time an autonomous part in the formation of his artistic achievements.
Hadji Boshkov is an extremely prolific artist who has created around 2000 prints and drawings over the course of fifty years of his work, with which he presents himself regularly at his solo exhibitions, but also at numerous international exhibitions, and he is also the winner of a number of domestic and international awards for graphics. This part of his work has so far been shown more fully only within his first retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje in 1989.
The exhibition Works on Paper includes a selection of over 500 prints, drawings, graphic maps, sketches, studies, and collages, of which several important cycles and projects of the artist will be exhibited for the first time. The exhibition shows the last huge cycle of extraordinarily suggestive monotypes and drawings titled Psychoscapes, made between 1998 and 2004, as well as the sketches and preparations for the End of the Century project for the unrealized participation in the Venice Biennale in 1999. But apart from them, some more unexhibited or unknown series or individual works are also on view in the exhibition which is staged in all three museum’s major gallery rooms. The exhibition also includes a reduced selection of sculptures as reference points in relation to the works on paper.
The title of the exhibition Works on Paper indicates the method and techniques that Hadji Boshkov applies in this medium, which shows that regardless of whether it is a graphic work or a sketch for the development of an idea, the artist’s approach is as if to a separate and finished artistic work. The universal themes of the man or the figure, the earth or the landscape, and the abstract motives, which Hadji Boshkov elaborates artistically in his impressive sculptural work mainly with the help of the rhythm of light and shadow, in the works on paper have a special power and meaning, not only because of the e artist’s mastery of drawing and graphic techniques but also because of the specifics of the medium that include greater narrative and symbolism in the representation.
The curator of the exhibition is Zoran Petrovski. On the occasion of the exhibition, a representative catalog will be printed with essays by art historians Lilijana Nedelkovska and Lazo Plavevski who write about the work of Hadji Boshkov Petar and its significance for modernism in Macedonian culture.
The general sponsor of the Museum of Contemporary Art and the printing of the exhibition catalog is Eurolink Insurance.