Through storytelling, the artist creates a dialogue between drawing, writing and the environment, to recount intimate experiences and thoughts between reality and fiction. With A Corned Solo Show, Nedko Solakov (Cherven Briag, Bulgaria, 1957), an international artist who lives and works in Sofia, presents a narrative designed for a particular point in the museum: the lobby. It is a visible, transitory place, usually not used for exhibitions because it is very different from an exhibition space; a corner that visitors might miss but which, thanks to the artist’s intervention, offers a real treasure once discovered.

Writing becomes drawing and interacts with the three-dimensional objects of the artist’s surfaces; brief descriptions, aphorisms and double meanings become a vehicle for comments and thoughts on social and collective issues.

Relying on a witty play on words – corner/cornered (corner/being cornered) – the artist chooses a corner of the MAXXI to critically and ironically narrate the contemporary art system: he explores its complexities, contradictions, alternatives, failures and experiments derived from the urgency of thinking, shaping and negotiating with the human condition and self-representation.

Project in collaboration with MUDAM, Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg. header: © Nedko Solakov, courtesy the artist.