Once in London, we rented a nice 2 bedroom flat in Herne Hill. You know, the type of Victorian conversion flats often described as ‘spacious’ by estate agents… I don’t know about ‘spacious’ but the place seemed big enough for 2 people and I quickly turned the second bedroom into a home studio.
We loved the area. Just around the corner from Dulwich Village and 10 min on the train to Victoria station, it was, we thought, perfect! But then, I was faced with the question of ‘How do you go about organizing an exhibition in one country, while settling down in another?’. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read my first post bellow)
No matter how smooth your move to another country, there are still a thousand things (probably more) to find out about, learn and explore… London’s enormously big, I doubt I’ll ever really come to know every part of the city. In those first days we made countless trips to Oxford Street, some of the famous markets and of course IKEA, mostly buying furniture. It took months before we had the essential stuff, like chairs and a sofa, delivered. Luckily there was a bed in the flat… There was JUST NO WAY I could travel to Varna, find a gallery and organize everything there. But I had 2 very important reasons why I wanted this exhibition to take place there:
1. I wanted to involve my father in it, he was slowly recovering from serious surgery and I thought it was really important to get him to start working again. Most of you probably don’t know this, but my father’s one of Bulgaria’s leading sculptors, and is (I know he’s my father and all) but I honestly think he’s amazingly talented. At that time he had practically stopped working, so I figured, maybe if he started making art again, it would take his mind off the surgery and his ill health and help him recover faster…
2. It was a ballet competition, one of the most important ballet competitions in the world in fact, so what’s a better place to exhibit ballet themed paintings?
So I enlisted the help of my amazing cousin Aneta. She lives in Varna and had just set up her own PR and Event Management Agency, called Anettevents. On a personal level, she was also worried about my father’s condition… Besides that, being in charge of the PR of the International Ballet Competition was her first big project and she was ecstatic about the idea of organizing an additional cultural event around it. Initially, my father flatly refused to get involved. He was so out if it, and having an exhibition in another city (he lives in Sofia) meant that he would not only have to go back to the studio and explore his purely physical ability to create, a rather traumatic perspective already, but also travel to Varna – something he really, really wanted to avoid. However, as things started happening and he was offered to create the Special Grand Prix award for the Competition he kinda got excited about the whole thing. Meanwhile Aneta had managed to find the right gallery for the exhibition. The owner, upon hearing that he can host Ivan Minekov’s first exhibition in Varna, moved around his already set program of exhibitions to give us the 2-3 weeks during the competition. To be perfectly honest, this was the first time I realized that galleries have their programs arranged months in advance, or longer… Had this guy not known who my father was, and wanted to exhibit his works (within the framework of a big cultural event – an added bonus for the gallery), it would have been impossible to proceed with the exhibition. Ah, did I mention I wanted to figure out the intricacies of the art world?… This blog is starting to resemble a memoire but hey, I’ll hopefully get to the present in another few posts… so read on ;)
