"'The Glass Rider'" Outdoor Sculpture

Nikola Nikolov began his art education at the National School of Applied Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria, specializing in metalwork, classical drawing, and modeling. In 1995, at the age of 23, he caught the attention of legendary fashion designer Paco Rabanne, who invited him to Paris after seeing his drawings. During their time together, Rabanne publicly referred to Nikola as “The new Michelangelo”, a statement that would echo throughout Nikola’s career and evolve into a guiding question behind his creative journey. Nikola continued his education at the Academy of Fine Arts (ABK) in Maastricht in 1996. During this period of intense artistic development, his talent was recognized when he was awarded the prestigious Gilbert de Bontridder Prijs in 2000. He subsequently earned his Master’s degree at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2002. In 2009, he founded Studio-Re-Creation, a practice built around transforming discarded materials into emotionally charged, symbolic artworks. Today, his work explores themes of trauma, survival, and transformation, assembling broken glass, metal, and found objects into powerful sculptural figures. A pivotal sculpture within Nikola's oeuvre, 'The Glass Rider', is a deeply personal, autobiographical self-portrait shaped by years of silent endurance and rebirth. Through it, Nikola embraces the legacy once suggested to him, not by imitating Michelangelo, but by forging a path of his own: carving resilience from destruction, and revealing the human spirit through the materials we leave behind.Spreading intangible, embodied, and personal forms of knowledge is closely connected to his desire to preserve cherished memories and materials. At the heart of his artistic practice lies a commitment to sustainability, not only in the environmental sense, but in the emotional preservation of meaning through upcycling and material transformation. A central element in Nikola's work is the contrast between the rational functionality of materials and the emotional resonance of objects. He works with materials that carry deep histories, discarded or overlooked objects, worn-out components, or belongings with sentimental value, giving them new life and function by transforming them into iconic sculptures and design pieces. By re-creating a client’s or his own belongings and weaving identity into the new form, he shifts and expands the object’s original context.