On September 15, 2017, an exhibition called “Lorem Ipsum” was opened at the Debut Gallery.
The exhibition marks the beginning of both the new creative season of the Debut Gallery and the new school year for the students and teachers of the Iliya Petrov National High School of Fine Arts. The authors whose works are presented in the gallery space are students from grades 11 and 12, majoring in “Book Illustration and Layout”.
The motto of the exhibition “Lorem Ipsum” directs the viewer to the sought-after conceptual and substantive feature of the exhibition. Lorem Ipsum is one of the most frequently used terms in the printing industry and graphic design. By placing the phrase, the artist marks a place in the margin of the page where he will position the text at a later stage of the layout. By manipulating Lorem Ipsum, he selects the font, size, color and other typographic features and thus visually prepares the relationship between text and image.
The specialty in which the authors presented at the exhibition are trained – “Illustration and Book Layout” implies the frequent use of Lorem Ipsum. The illustration is one with the text that accompanies and complements it, and with the book body – the final product of the combination of text, illustration and graphic design.
The exhibition is the result of a learning task set to the young artists by their teacher and head of the specialty “Illustration and Book Layout” Alexandra Gogova, who is also the curator of the exhibition. The task is to create a magazine with illustrations of comics, classic works, children's fairy tales, as well as author's texts.[1]
The presented works are a kind of demonstration of the progress and professional training of the students. The task, which is also a unifying line of the exhibition, provokes the authors to develop their own individual approach to work. Having complete freedom to choose a literary work to interpret, the method of work, the techniques and materials, the students complete the assignment, which from a boring academic task turns into a challenge. We also see the result in the Debut gallery – a huge range of expressive means and plastic language – classic forms of illustration and graphic design, as well as contemporary experimental forms such as installations.
The texts chosen by the students are extremely diverse, depending on the personal preferences of each of them. We can find works by popular authors such as Tolkien, Arthur Conan Doyle, Nikolay Haitov, Kenneth Grahame, Jules Verne, Ransom Riggs, Chris Woodings. Some choose to illustrate moments from ancient Greek mythology, from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, from the stories of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, about Alice and the Wizard of Oz. The Holy Scripture also becomes an object of interpretation – the biblical story of the Tower of Babel inspires Todor Rabadzhiyski to create an author’s book, installation and poster. The author’s books/comics by Elitsa Nikolova, Todor Georgiev, Preslav Vladov and Ralitsa Alexieva, as well as the scenography by Kalina Boneva, break the understanding of student creativity. A board that collected several posters inspired by the libretto of Wagner’s opera “Parsifal” also arouses exceptional interest.
The listed examples testify to the serious attitude of the students towards the subject they are dealing with. The literary basis, the author’s created texts for illustration, the variety of materials, techniques, means of expression, plastic language and stylistics of the works from the exhibition eloquently demonstrate the individual qualities of each of the authors, their worldview and approach to interpreting the content.
The exhibition “Lorem Ipsum” by students from 11th and 12th grade at the Iliya Petrov National Institute of Art and Design can be seen until October 13 at the Debut Gallery.
[1] The idea for the name of the exhibition is also related to the task set. In the words of Alexandra Gogova: “until they made the construction of the magazine itself, the students replaced the text with the Lorem Ipsum quote everywhere” – interview with the curator at the Bulgarian National Radio – http://bnr.bg/post/100873633/lorem-ipsum
Text: Ekaterina Mihaylova – chief curator at the Serdika Gallery; 4th year student at the Department of Art Studies at the National Academy of Arts
Photos: Milena Radeva
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