Feature
‘Vejdi Rashidov’
Saatchi Art & Music Magazine, London
A feature on sculptor Vejdi Rashidov, published in the 2018 summer edition and last physical print run of Saatchi Art & Music Magazine.
The feature was commissioned to coincide with Rashidov’s first solo exhibition at Gagliardi Gallery (10th - 21st July 2018).
Printed in London, 2018
Extract —
“Opening on the 11th of July at the Gagliardi Gallery, a comprehensive selection of works from former Minister of Culture and current MP (and Chairman of the Cultural Committee of the Bulgarian Parliament) come-neo-expressionist sculptor Vejd Rashidov will present an enthralling oeuvre of industrial grit and wrought creativity. Roberto Gagliardi, (founder of the gallery), was so impressed when he saw Rashidov's work in Sofia he invited him to show in London. At times rapturous, at others eerie and uncanny, Rashidov’s gothic iconography, neo-pagan busks and twilight mysticism are a vertiginous confrontation with the spectres of European Modernist art.
Despite its tenuous kernel, the capital T truth is that Rashidov’s artworks point to the very being of Art—the ghostly, phantom-like presence of something beyond the bronze. Selected by Svetla Dionisieva, Director of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in London, and Peter Gagliardi, curator of the 40-year-old prestigious London art gallery, the 35 works on show siphon from neoclassicism to archaism; from Boccioni to the Neolithic. In typically Modernist fashion, form and material are entwined like an ouroboros: emaciated shins convulse into brute metal, whilst bovine skulls exude venom like molten spit straight from the furnace; alongside, a host of sketches and watercolours will provide a rare glimpse into Rashidov’s unique artistic process.
Described by former Director of the Louvre, Henry Loyrett, as carrying the “artist’s inner essence”, the selected works are visceral yet incandescent.The exhibition will be opened by the Bulgarian Ambassador to London, Mr. Konstantin Dimitrov, and represents the greatest display of Rashidov’s work in the United Kingdom to date.”