4-5-6-7

Picasso's musing that every child is an artist is both true and exaggerated. Young children create art instinctively and with great enthusiasm – it is their way of exploring the world and the capabilities of their senses and fingers, to understand and express their emotions. The first solo exhibition of eight-year-old Matilda Finzi is an astonishing example of the immediacy and inherent honesty of children's art – and  a stunning proof that in this case we really do have an artist in the making: someone who combines the innocence of youth with a more mature eye for detail and circumstance, and a hand capable of depicting entire worlds and situations with spare but expressive lines drawn in black ink.

Yes, black ink. We tend to associate children's art with splashes of bold colour and rough shapes, but Matilda Finzi's drawings of strange creatures, funny situations and birds are reminiscent of Picasso's own sketches, Tove Jansson's magical characters and the illustrations drawn by the renowned Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov for his children's book We, the Sparrows. And yet Matilda Finzi's magical world stands firmly on its own, and the exhibition at Gallery 88 Kamen Popov is built around it, allowing it to shine in its own light.

Matilda with parents Lisa Boeva and Itzhak Finzi

4-5-6-7 includes 32 drawings by Matilda made when she was four, five, six and seven years old (hence the exhibition's title). They are mainly in black ink, but here and there, hanging from the ceiling, are splashes of colour – oil crayon drawings made especially for the show.

The opening of the exhibition on 5 June coincides with the launch of Matilda's first book. Honk is a collection of short stories whose main characters are the honks – creatures with noses and noises similar to those of vacuum cleaners.

Matilda's debut exhibition is the result of a happy combination of hard work, luck and the good fortune of being born into a family of prominent intellectuals: actor and musician Itzhak Finzi and Liza Boeva. The owners of Gallery 88 Kamen Popov first saw Matilda's illustrations in her father's book Five Plays Told by an Actor and suggested the exhibition. Fortunately, her parents had meticulously collected her drawings. Now the most impressive of them are ready to meet their first viewers outside the comfort and intimacy of the family home. An early but promising first step for Matilda and her fascinating art.

When: 5-20 June 2025
Where: Gallery 88 Kamen Popov, Sofia, 25 Bogatitsa St