Nikolay Maystorov

Nikolay Maystorov (b. 7 August 1943, Sofia) is a Bulgarian painter and graphic artist whose career spans more than half a century. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts ('Nikolai Pavlovich') in Sofia in 1969 and is a full-time professor at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia (Department of Fine Arts), where he has maintained an active studio practice in painting and graphics throughout his career.

Maystorov's connection to Japan runs through the Lessedra-organized Bulgarian-Japanese print exchange. His prints were featured in the 2003 'Contemporary Bulgarian Art Prints in Japan' touring exhibition, organized by the Contemporary Art Project Lessedra, which showed at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (September-October 2003) and the Tokushima Modern Art Museum (November 2003). The exhibition presented his 'Apocalypse now or for ever' cycle — a series of 23 lithographs after the Apocalypse of St. John. Two prints from the cycle are documented in the exhibition catalogue: a lithograph after Chapter 4 (76 × 56 cm, 2000) and a lithograph after Chapter 16 (56 × 76 cm, 2000).

His aesthetic register is figurative and existential: he describes himself as interested in 'man as existence, mainly as a psychic existence, as a dualistic nature swinging between the two poles of good and evil.' The Apocalypse cycle, organized around the iconographic register of judgment and revelation, is a canonical example of this sensibility, with its dense compositional structure and dramatic figural staging executed across the lithographic plate.

Maystorov has accumulated significant recognition over his career. His awards include the Grand Prix for Painting 'Vladimir Dimitrov – The Master' from the Union of Bulgarian Artists (1986), a 2nd prize for graphics at the International Biennial of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo (1987), an award for painting at the International Triennial of Painting in Sofia (1996), an Honorary Diploma from the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture (1998), and the National Award for Painting 'Zahari Zograff' (2005). His works are held in collections including Peter Ludwig's collection of Bulgarian art in Cologne, Germany; the graphic collection in Düsseldorf; modern-art collections in Berlin and in Seoul, South Korea; the city collection of Dordrecht, Holland; and the National Gallery and Sofia City Gallery in Bulgaria.

Alongside his teaching at the New Bulgarian University, Maystorov's standing as a senior printmaking educator was reflected in the 'Prof. Nikolay Maystorov and Students' exhibition at the National Gallery in Sofia, which brought his work together with that of his students. He also maintains a Saatchi Art profile through which his lithographs and paintings reach international collectors.

Within the contemporary Bulgarian-Japanese print exchange, Maystorov's lithographs were shown alongside those of other Bulgarian printmakers — among them Rumen Skorchev, Ivan Ninov, and Milko Bozhkov — in the Lessedra-organized Japanese exhibition. His large-scale, narrative-driven graphic cycles, of which the 23-work Apocalypse series is the fullest example, place his work within a Bulgarian existential-narrative graphic tradition closer to mid-20th-century Central European print expressionism than to the formal-minimalist tendencies of Japanese contemporary mokuhanga.