Kiril Efremov

Kiril Efremov (; 19 December 1938 in Štip – 30 September 2020 in Štip) was a Macedonian painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, poet and art essayist. He is regarded as one of the most significant representatives of surrealist tendencies in modern Macedonian painting. Art historian Boris Petkovski described his expression as a "special symbolic variant of surrealism", while the poet and critic Vlada Urošević placed him among the most prominent Macedonian painters to adopt surrealist principles in a relatively pure form.

Efremov was a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Macedonia (, ДЛУМ) from 1966 and served as its president from 1995 to 1997. During his career he mounted more than 50 solo exhibitions and participated in about 100 group exhibitions in Yugoslavia, North Macedonia and abroad. His work was the subject of retrospective exhibitions in Skopje in 2003 and 2025.

Early life and education

Efremov was born on 19 December 1938 in Štip to Todor and Stojka Efremovi. He studied painting at the School of Applied Arts in Skopje in the class of Lazar Ličenoski, and subsequently completed the first degree of study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade.

Efremov belonged to a generation of Macedonian artists who emerged in the early 1960s, during a period of increasing engagement with contemporary European and Yugoslav art movements. Although Informalism and abstraction were prominent in Macedonian painting at the time, he remained committed to representational and figurative painting.

Surrealist and fantastic expression

In the early 1960s, Efremov's paintings were characterised by a romantic atmosphere, fantasy and dream imagery, often rendered with smooth, resonant painted surfaces. During 1965 and 1966 his compositions became denser, his palette more subdued, and the literary basis of the pictures increasingly gave way to the exploration of formal pictorial values and the relationship between figuration and abstract association. The catalogue text was written by the author Slavko Janevski, who described Efremov as "clear in drawing and unequivocal in colour" and called the narrative of his pictures a "collage of unrest".

He also treated Biblical and religious subjects, including the Crucifixion, the Last Supper, the Virgin Mary and motherhood, as well as themes from Macedonian history. His later works addressed alienation, urbanisation, threats to the natural environment, war and the degradation of contemporary civilisation. Megalopolis 1 and Megalopolis 2 (1979) were associated with the dangers of urban development, while a number of other compositions depicted environmental destruction and devastated landscapes.

Throughout his work, realistically modelled figures and objects are combined with fantastic, allegorical and unreal scenes. According to Vladimir Velichkovski, realism remained a persistent foundation of Efremov's art, interwoven with surreal and fantastic imagery, personal memory and dream images; the resulting work consequently has a pronounced autobiographical component.

Critical reception

Critical writing on Efremov has usually considered his paintings in the context of Macedonian surrealism and fantastic art. In 1966, Boris Petkovski connected Efremov's early work with the Belgrade surrealist circle and observed a transition from glossy, romantic and dreamlike surfaces towards a muted palette and denser compositions. In the 1987 Likovna enciklopedija Jugoslavije, Petkovski stated that Efremov had developed a "special symbolic variant of surrealism".

Gallery

The following paintings are reproduced in the 2025 retrospective catalogue.

The exhibition catalogue was published by the National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia and edited by Ali Sinani, in a print run of 300 copies. Its photographs were produced by Toše Ristov and Igor Vasilev, and it was published in Macedonian, Albanian and English.

Awards and honours

Eighth of November Award of the Assembly of the Municipality of Štip Lazar Ličenoski Award of DLUM Kliment Ohridski Award of the National and University Library and DLUM Second prize for portraiture at an exhibition in Tuzla, awarded for a portrait of Josip Broz Tito

Collections and representation

Efremov's works are held by the National Gallery of the Republic of North Macedonia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, the Art Gallery in Kumanovo, and the Institute and Museum in Štip. His works are also held in private collections in Skopje, Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Paris, London, Stockholm, Bern and Zürich.

The National Gallery holds Mannequins, Mediocres and Sacred Remains (1969–1970), while Pavel Shatev Leaves the Burning Ship Guadalquivir was exhibited at the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle in Skopje.

Efremov was included in reference publications including Who's Who in Yugoslavia, the Likovna enciklopedija Jugoslavije, and Boris Petkovski's study Contemporary Macedonian Painting.

Poetry and art writing

In addition to his visual art, Efremov wrote poetry. He published the collections:

Okovano oko (; Shackled Eye, 1994) Lačoozar (, 2001)

The collections drew on Biblical motifs and were illustrated with the artist's own vignette drawings. He also published art essays, reviews and catalogue texts in Razgledi, Sovremenost and Delo.