Cédric Van Parys: Stone, Steel & Sky

Stone, Steel & Sky, presented at the National Palace of Culture, is the first institutional solo exhibition of artist and researcher Cédric Van Parys in Sofia, Bulgaria. It brings together works created over the past several years, tracing the evolution of his artistic practice—from microhistorical readings of place to speculative inquiries into infrastructure as both symbol and memory. 

This exhibition explores Van Parys’ interest in tectonics, gravity, weight, and matter, while also alluding to infrastructure as spaces of promise. Whether imagining billboards in Chicago as sacred portals, transforming Bulgarian-Turkish water fountains into kinetic installations, observing aerial highways and birds soaring above Brussels, or balancing industrial precision with raw organic form, Van Parys hijacks and appropriates existing symbols and structures, rearranging and juxtaposing elements and materials from the urban and rural landscape in ways that trigger the imagination, merging a critical post-capitalist message with a poetic sacredness. Even today, despite modern secularism and increased order and control, a spiritual life persists. His sculptures, installations, and images seem to offer a setting for that life, but one free of religious ideology or political manipulation. Naturally, his work resonates with the monumental spirit of the National Palace of Culture—built in 1981 as a national symbol of cultural ambition—now caught between past ideology and the search for new meaning.

Van Parys does not just respond to specific contexts—landscapes, structures, materials, layers of cultural memory—he transforms them through his work by harnessing the collective energy of the lives connected to these places. This is clearly shown in this exhibition, where sculpture, installation, and photography are presented in dialogue, allowing new narratives to emerge.

Cédric Van Parys is an artist and researcher operating between Brussels (BE), Rotterdam (NL), and Sofia (BG). He creates sculptural works, site-specific installations, photographic assemblages, and publications that explore the relationship between monuments, infrastructure, symbols, rituals, and aesthetics. By collecting various phenomena as individual elements and reassembling them in new ways, Van Parys questions traditional ideas of culture and nature. His work has been exhibited at institutions, galleries, and universities in the United States, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Italy, and China. He was the 2023–24 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago.

The exhibition is organized within the framework of the project “The City and its Symbols”: a presentation to the Bulgarian audience of the work of Cédric Van Parys, supported by the European Union through the NextGenerationEU initiative under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of the Republic of Bulgaria, and curated by Kiril Naumov. Realised in collaboration with the National Palace of Culture.