Back to Back is their first collaborative work to date. Both artists have established their international reputations in the last fifteen years with an impressive number of museum and gallery exhibitions around the world.

One could argue that Solakov and Perjovschi have a lot in common. Both artists live and work in a region known as Eastern Europe, respectively the countries of Bulgaria and Romania. They both use the medium of drawing, expanding it into installation and performance by taking over walls, rooms, or entire buildings to make their works. Despite these similarities their practices remain autographic, which explains why even in a first collaborative project Solakov and Perjovschi stand back to back expressing their distinctive views of the world.

Solakov is a great storyteller who creates personal narratives for specific contexts. Perjovschi is an incisive social and political commentator whose drawings are striped bare of any unnecessary details. Text and image are intrinsic to both artists’ lexicons.

Using humor and irony as a form of poetic conceptualism Solakov’s drawings lure the viewer into a fantasy world where absurdity rules, while Perjovschi’s reflect on macro-political events with a sensibility that is as witty as it is pointed. Because of his talent to condense complex ideas into direct visual images, Perjovschi was invited in the aftermath of the December 1989 Romanian revolution to illustrate the oppositional magazine Contrapunct and later 22.

For this exhibition Perjovschi and Solakov will create a new body of work. A u-shaped wall structure made out of wood panels will inhabit the main gallery space. The two artists will draw directly on it, with ink and permanent markers, one on the inside and the other on the outside surface for a period of 4 days prior to the opening of the show. Then they will take upon themselves to expand onto the gallery walls and let their drawings and ideas explore the architectural space around. In the second gallery Solakov will present his new series of drawings on paper ironically titled Stupidity. Perjovschi will exhibit his notebooks filled with drawings that represent the thinking process behind his large-scale installations.