Pandora's Box VI

The sixth print in Skorchev's extended Pandora's Box series, this lithograph engages with the Greek myth of Pandora releasing evils into the world while hope remained in the vessel. Lithography — a planographic process based on the antipathy of grease and water — afforded Skorchev the tonal range and gestural mark-making suited to his figurative idiom, where crayon and tusche could be combined on stone or plate. The series, developed across multiple compositions, treats the myth as a recurring framework for examining containment, release, and the human condition rather than as literal narrative illustration. By 2000 Skorchev had been working in graphic art for over four decades and held his professorship at the National Academy of Art in Sofia, granted in 1984. The Pandora prints sit within the later phase of his practice, drawing on his earlier illustration training at the Sofia Art Academy and the symbolic register cultivated through late-20th-century Bulgarian printmaking. His 1979 Japan Foundation scholarship had earlier given him direct contact with Japanese graphic traditions.