Career
Since 1990 Lazarov has been living in The Netherlands. Almost completely unknown in his home country, Peter Lazarov is one of the very few living artists within the official collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where, amongst others one finds the Night watch by Rembrandt. Other prestigious collections include Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, The Hague, Netherlands.
Museum of fine arts, Okinawa, Japan.
National Library of Congress, Washington District of Columbia, United States of America. Yale University, United States of America.
And the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Canada. His expressive style bares the marks of the rich Bulgarian tradition and simultaneously the influences of Dürer, Rembrandt, Escher, or Willem de Kooning. In 2003, he visited Japan to work with the master paper maker, Sensei Fujimori-san, considered a "National treasure" in Japan.
Today Peter Lazarov makes his own papers, using the ancient Japanese techniques.
One may consider Lazarov to be the only Bulgarian artist who possesses this knowledge. He has illustrated numerous fine-press books for such authors as Louis Paul Boon, Atanas Daltchev, Cor Jellema, Kavafis, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë, Victor Hugo, Archimedes, or Crispin Elsted amongst others
In 2002 he founded his own private press, PEPELpress, for limited-edition, hand-made books In 2006 two of his books, notably “Shoji” and "Melancholi..", were chosen amongst the 50 best bibliographical editions in The Netherlands for 2004-2005, Mooi Marginaal.
In 2007 a large exhibition of Peter Lazarov in Shanghai, China, showing 200 engravings was "sold out"—an unseen event for the author
In October 2008, Peter Lazarov was the centre of the world graphics exhibition in Beijing, China, when he was elected by the Organizational committee of the World Congress of FISAE in Beijing, China, as among the 10 best artists printmakers in the world, working in the field of Ex Libris and small graphic art lieutenant was the first time such an honour was bestowed upon a Bulgarian artist.
