Cult

Alexander Valchev

26-04-2025 until 10-09-2025

The impossibility of professional working conditions has been a ghost that has haunted Bulgarian artists for decades — tireless, familiar, and unwelcome. Everything — from the basic conditions for creating art to the rare luxury of critique or, dare we dream, a functioning art market — whatever little existed before, it all lies in ruins.

Gallery Gallery was built on these ruins, but they have also found their way into artistic practice.

In the early 2010s, Bulgarian sculptor Alexander Valchev found himself repeatedly moving between apartments. With no space to work, no funding, no materials, and the deadline for an upcoming solo exhibition casting its shadow, Alexander started creating sculptures out of the boxes that, until recently, held his personal belongings. That show, Sculpture as a Hobby, contained several ideas that would resurface in Alexander’s later work.

One of those ideas is the weight, the immensity, the inescapable monumentality of this inability to create.
For New Life at the Goethe Institute in Sofia (2015), Alexander built a wall out of cardboard boxes that made part of the show inaccessible.
Another work, Obelisk (2019), consists of a menhir-sized cardboard box covered in drawings of the artist’s attempts to manhandle the object while he ignores the standardised handling symbols along the box’s base.
In Ruins of an Unbuild Bridge (2024), Alexander addresses the quiet failure of a promise: the removal of a signature bridge across the Yantra River as a key feature of an approved urban revitalisation plan — silently dropped before it was realised.

For his show at Gallery Gallery, Alexander created a new work titled Cult, in which he turns his attention to the structures that shape our material existence: a system of wealth distribution that treats resources as a zero-sum equation, allegedly a law of nature. The work takes the form of a stylised megalithic structure, covered in recycled cardboard from boxes once used to transport products from the world’s richest and most powerful brands.

Cult exists only in augmented reality. It can be seen but not touched. The work exists as a ruin in a speculative future — though the materials and the crisis it points to are of the present. Cult is both artefact and omen: real in its composition, real in its commentary, yet simultaneously suspended in a space and pointing to a time just beyond reach.
Cult confronts us with a future that feels as real as the conditions that make professional artistic practice impossible today.

Alexander Valchev is a sculptor who lives and works in Sofia, Bulgaria. He has a master’s degree in Sculpture from the National Academy of Art and in Photography from the New Bulgarian University. In 2004, he was a resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and he was a resident at CCN in Graz, Austria, in 2008.

His solo exhibitions include Constructive Fluctuations (2019) at the Institute for Contemporary Art, How to Deal with the Object (2019) at Credo Bonum Gallery, A New Life (2015) at the Goethe Institut Sofia, Sculpture as a Hobby (2014) at gallery Arosita, and We Love the Dogs and the Dogs Love Us (2011) at the Goethe Institut Sofia.
He has participated in international festivals, including the Danube Dialogues Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 2018, UAMO in Munich, Germany, in 2016, the Month of Photography in Vienna, Austria, in 2008, Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2007, and in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2007.