During the summer of 2026, Sarieva/Gallery presents a special focus on the work of internationally acclaimed artist Krasimir Terziev in the DOT Sofia's hall. The exhibition will be on view from May to September.
Krassimir Terziev is a leading Bulgarian contemporary interdisciplinary artist with an international career, working across video, photography, and text, and addressing contemporary cultural and social themes. His practice questions the boundaries between reality and fiction, while exploring the multiple transitions and tensions between a globalized world - dominated by an overwhelming multiplicity of symbolic imagery and its material grounding in technological, physical, and human “hardware.”
Born in 1969 in Dobrich, Bulgaria, Terziev lives and works in Sofia. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Sofia University (2012), where he has been lecturing since, and an MA degree in Painting from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia (1997), where he lectured from 2009 to 2016. He is a member of the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia.
His work is included in major collections such as Centre Pompidou/MNAM (Paris) and Arteast 2000+ (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana), and has been exhibited internationally at institutions including TATE Modern, Stedelijk Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Manifesta 14.
Most recently Terziev presented a large-scale installation “Between the Past That Is About to Happen and the Future That Has Already Been” (2024–2025), installed at the site of the former Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in the center of Sofia.
Works on view
King Kong Digitised, 2024
The work depicts a scene from the production of King Kong. A quiet moment in which the giant ape expresses his love to the female protagonist. An already uncanny image synthesising manyfold fantasm gets complicated by the interference of the cinematic machinery and the digital glitches.
Moon Palm Earth, 2018
Space appears as the most encompassing metaphor for totality — a sterile, perfect, and inaccessible space for contemplation, reachable only through technology and science fiction. The first view of Earth from another planet came with the Apollo missions in 1969, but a year earlier Stanley Kubrick had already visualized this perspective in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Over the years, Krasimir Terziev has produced a series of works (collages, drawings, paintings) in which the image of Earth seen from space is often combined with a palm tree in the foreground. This creates a tension between the distant cosmic gaze and the intimate fantasy of a tropical paradise, leaving interpretation open to the viewer. Space thus becomes a carefully “tamed” fantasy carrying the weight of civilization.
God Save the Market, 2025
A tribute to an earlier work (God Save…, 2013, intervention in public space) with the same slogan. The work is addressing the occasion of the financial transformation in Bulgaria in the end of 2025, converting from the national currency of Leva to Euro. On the occasion the National Bank issued a 2 euro coin with the slogan “God save Bulgaria” inscribed on the edge of the coin. That slogan is slightly altered in this photomontage.
The series “Mondrian in the Logging, 2025
Using actual industrial methods for optimizing wood material, the artist reveals how the cross-section of a tree trunk — shaped by accumulated time — is translated into a geometric grid reminiscent of Mondrian’s aesthetic. This encounter between the trunk (nature) and the grid (Kunst/culture) underscores how modern rationalism reduces the complexity of natural forms to abstract and standardized structures.
* Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was a Dutch artist and one of the founders of abstract art.
