The story goes that in 384 CE, Symmachus, the pagan senator, consul and city prefect in the late Roman Empire, witnessed the removal of the statue of the goddess of victory—Victoria—which towered over the centre of the Roman Forum. Observing this act, with a characteristic flair for rhetoric comparable only to that of Cicero, Symmachus remarked, ‘the sky covers us all, the same universe encompasses us. What does it matter what practical system we adopt in our search for truth? Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.’
Today, more than sixteen centuries later, we all seem to still be searching for our truth. And it seems that this continues to be most evident in the art world. Through the pursuits of poets, playwrights, composers, architects, painters. And of course through the endless seeking of the collector. That collector of worlds who, guided by their personal taste, their intimate encounters with art, their wanderings around the world and their attempts to find meaning, constructs their very own individual museum. Not a museum of innocence, but of meaning. A collection of artefacts that the collector looks at every day – as proof of their own being, as evidence of being here and now. Existing.
The exhibition There’s not only one way. 70 Works from the Iliyan Donchev Collection, the second in the series of Art Gallery Kazanlak’s platform The Searchers, appears as a kind of continuation of the big conversation about the importance of the figure of the collector in the contemporary development of the art scene. It appears as an attempt to search for and make sense of the answers to the questions “Why do we collect?”, “What do we collect?” and of course – “How do we do it?”. Three questions which are impossible to answer unambiguously, because there is no one way. And the approach that collector Iliyan Donchev chooses, consciously or not, is shaped by the very quintessence of the Roman consul Symmachus. At first glance chaotic, it is in fact a compact collection that uniquely reflects the wanderings of its collector – around our country, around the world, through time, towards himself and the Other.
Along paths of chance, whose serendipity is merely an illusion. Entering his seventieth year, Iliyan Donchev, whose patronage undoubtedly had an influence on the formation of Art Gallery Kazanlak’s collection during the 1980s and 1990s, today offers us the chance to embark on a true visual journey – through painting, sculpture, religious art and drawing. Through works that are markers not only of the past from which they come, but also in their own way of our own present, in which globalisation is forcing a reconciliation between disparate visual pursuits, because although we do not travel a single path, we all seem to be drawn towards a common horizon – that of beauty, despite the confusion we live in.
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The Searchers platform is a long-term project which will present fragments of private collections put together by the efforts of various collectors. With it, we aim for residents and guests of Kazanlak not only to encounter some valuable artefacts, without which the Bulgarian and European history of art would be incomplete, but also to ask important questions about the phenomenon of “private collection” and its exceptional significance for the existence of contemporary art, as well as its role as an important part of our cultural existence in general. A no less essential task that we set for ourselves with the present programme is to provoke a meaningful conversation about the problems of the art market, the role of art historians in it, and possible initiatives and policies to promote collecting. The platform was initiated with the 2023 exhibition Building, in which we presented Italian art from the 19th and 20th centuries, part of the collection of Georgi and Vanya Zabchevi.