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Retrospective

17. November 2000 - 16. March 2001 Curators: Gerard Meulensteen, Kiro Urdin

“He lives to paint”, not the other way around. In his paintings Kiro Urdin has created a private heaven. His pictures resemble a look through the microscope enlarged to monumental dimensions. The pigments, particularly the shades of blue, red and yellow, with accents of green, are like the cells of protoplasm ‌ growing and dividing to create new forms. His painted universe combines microcosm and macro­cosm into a new entity. As an eternal pilgrim, he seeks the answer to the question about the essence of life and painting because for him painting is the “discovery of the truth”. He perceives it as a “parallel to life”. Kiro Urdin undertakes an adventurous journey across the space created by colours – is it his heaven or the universe? He wanders, searching the bounded yet endless space of canvas and discovers new horizons of his painting. It is dominated by blue – the colour of the sky, by cosmic expanses, but also by hope. His Planetarium is a patch of blue sky, a piece of a distant world extracted from his interior. He created it in the same way as the unknown mosaic makers who composed their visions from bits of colourful stones. To create Planetarium, he drew inspiration from his trips around the world – from Lake Ohrid through the Great Wall of China and the Tomb of Jesus Christ to Cusco. His subjective conviction about universal inner unity and truth joins artists from all over the world.