The personal pronoun "my" sums up Nedko Solakov’s project on exhibition at the Fondazione Galleria Civica in Trento, written in brackets in the title, All in (My) Order, with Exceptions. A co-production with the IKON gallery in Birmingham, the Museu Serralves in Porto and SMAK in Ghent—each with its own exhibition of Solakov works selected by each institution’s curators—the show in Trento holds a peculiar twist. For his exhibition at the Fondazione Galleria Civica, Solakov personally curated the selection of the works on view, choosing works from among those excluded by the curators of the other three institutions. All in (My) Order is unique, representing not only the most complete retrospective organized thus far on the work of the Bulgarian artist, but also an actual personal diary, a narrative composed by Solakov himself and unravelling at the rhythm of one work per year. Conceived as a life and artistic journey spanning two decades, from 1981—the year of the beginning of his career as an artist—until 2011, the show is also a subtle narrative of the last thirty years of European history traversed almost stealthily by Solakov, from his first urban murals to his international success of today.

The overall character of the project recalls the tradition of the Künstlerroman, in which the narrative is divided into seasons and stages marking the development of the artist’s personal experience. Seen in this light, the beginning of the exhibition seems like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Solakov begins presenting himself through his earliest drawings, composed when he was serving as a young conscript soldier in the Bulgarian army and dreaming of becoming a professional artist. Particularly remarkable among these is a small sketch of his grandparents’ home, depicting the house’s workshop where his grandfather took his own life when diagnosed with cancer.

Solakov’s story as an artist further develops through his discovery of Western capitalist society, encountered for the first time on the occasion of a several months-long residency in Belgium in 1987 and then at the onset of a new world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a crucial change of perspectives in the artist’s career. Solakov distills a common sensibility from all of his artistic experience, rendering it not only as a private statement but as one tessera in a larger mosaic, that of public life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the transition between the collapse of the socialist block and the start of a new and uncertain historical moment in which liberalism and democracy ended up identified with the capitalist model. In the show Solakov has decided to include also Top Secret (1989-90), an index box filled with cards detailing the artist’s youthful collaboration with the Bulgarian State security as an informer, which he stopped in 1983. A work that generated great controversy in 1983, when it was exhibited for the first time, Top Secret is now a classic in Solakov’s production, a gesture of self-disclosure that shows his coming to terms with his past biography. The larger history continuously interferes with the private life of the artist, who also entertains the audience with ironic recounts of the intimate sides of his personal life, even recounting his past love affairs, marriages and travels as well as accounts of his life in the international art scene.

The intense rhythm of the show—combining paintings, installations and texts hand-written directly onto the gallery’s walls—transforms the decades between 1981 and 2011 into a sort of historical fresco, a concentration of real life organized with the precision of a movie script. To reinforce this narrative, viewers have at their disposal a series of folders chronologically arranged by the artist to enrich their understanding of each year and to allow for a more in-depth understanding of his distinct path. Thirty years rendered as self-portrait seems to leave Solakov no room for any kind of nostalgia towards the past, and this approach might be the final key with which to read his retrospective: no statement of a so-called Ostalgie but a manifesto with which to navigate the New Millennium.