At the initiative of the City Art Gallery – Plovdiv, a chamber exhibition of illustrations by Lyuben Zidarov, depicting nine different world classic books, is being showcased to the Plovdiv audience. The exquisite works of the renowned master are displayed in Hall 1 on the first floor of the main Permanent Exhibition at 14A "Saborna" Street in the Old Town. The exhibition can be viewed until the end of September 2024.

"Lyuben Zidarov (1923 – 2023) is often described as the illustrator of multiple generations of young and not-so-young readers. This can hardly be otherwise, considering his creative career spanned eight decades and produced illustrations for over 200 titles, including many timeless classics from both world and Bulgarian literature - Andersen, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Dumas, Hoffmann, Oscar Wilde, Yavorov, Razzvetnikov, Karalichev, and many more. Many of these works were published multiple times over the years, each time with new, evolved versions of the illustrations - a hallmark of the artist's creative practice, 'aging' and growing wiser along with the works he illustrated.

This current chamber exhibition features illustrations for nine different books from the National Gallery's collection, recently shown as part of the author's retrospective exhibition "One Hundred Years" at the Union of Bulgarian Artists gallery in Sofia. The adventure classic "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson was one of Lyuben Zidarov's great loves. From the cover of the 1960 edition, through the author's comic adaptation of the novel, to the exhibited 1977 illustrations, which won the "Boris Angelushev" annual award (and were reissued in 2009) - they represent one of the most recognizable and memorable visions in the artist-illustrator's pictorial universe.

"Fairy Tales from Around the World" by Nikolay Raynov (1964, 1974, and 2017) is another deeply personal connection realized between writer and illustrator. The imposing colorful vision of the American South in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1979 and 2003), the original aesthetic imagery in the two-color illustrations for "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1985), the magical fairy tales of Hoffmann's stories (1981), the captured enchantments of the Orient in "Scheherazade's Tales" (eight editions between 1961 and 2023), and the atmosphere of Gothic England from the Tudor era in "The Prince and the Pauper" by Mark Twain (1978 and 2018) or the bygone exoticism of the Wild West in "The Son of the Bear Hunter" by Karl May (1983) and "The Phantom of Llano Estacado" (1985) - all these are part of the incredibly rich kaleidoscope of an artistic imagination that turned the illustrator into a storyteller."