The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

In front of the Presidency

The ceremonial change of the guard in front of the Presidency marks the national and public holidays in Bulgaria. The officialchange of the guard takes place on the first Wednesday of every month at 12:00 o’clock.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Bulgaria Concert Hall
Conductor
Nayden Todorov
Solоist/s
Emanuil Ivanov
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra
Program
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.1 in B-flat minor, Op.23
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Fourth Symphony

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Bulgaria Concert Hall
Conductor
Borjan Canev
Solоist/s
Ivaylo Vassilev
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra
Program
Ludwig van Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 2
Joseph Haydn – Symphony No.102 in B-flat Major, Hob.I/102

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Palace The National Gallery marks the centenary of the birth of Vladimir Goev (1925–2013), an illustrious representative of the generation of Bulgarian painters that won recognition in the second half of the 20th century. His name is closely linked to the history of the National Art Gallery in Sofia, where he is remembered as one of its successful directors of undisputed merit in establishing the institution and developing its collections.
As a student of the great Dechko Uzunov, Goev absorbed from him his breadth of brushstroke and the search for a rich, complex facture of painting. For a short while, we see in his early canvases a close adherence to realistic thinking, but also an attempt to make his escape through a more modern, synthetic understanding of the form.
The landscapist Vladimir Goev of the 1970s and 1980s is defined as an artist of quiet contemplation, emphasising the silence in his canvases as the main personage, suggested through a reserved monochromaticity, but also by a profundity of expression.
The exhibition presents works owned by the National Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, and the artist’s heirs.
Curators: Aneliya Nikolaeva and Ivan Milev Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Bulgaria Concert Hall
Solоist/s
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

In front of the Presidency

The ceremonial change of the guard in front of the Presidency marks the national and public holidays in Bulgaria. The officialchange of the guard takes place on the first Wednesday of every month at 12:00 o’clock.

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

Bulgaria Concert Hall
Conductor
Dario Salvi
Solоist/s
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra
National Philharmonic Choir
Program
Johann Strauss Jr. – “Indigo und die vierzig Räuber”
Operetta

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Kvadrat 500
Curators: Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza Lachezar Boyadjiev is internationally renowned for his critical observations and dissections of the changing public domain in Bulgaria and Southeastern Europe, particularly following the sociopolitical changes of 1989. He is driven by a curiosity about what lies beyond the most visible. In the context of a project engaged with the discriminatory representation of the Roma minority in the then polarised Bulgarian public environment—both media and urban—during the autumn of 2003, the artist ‘removed’ the human figure from the equestrian monument to Alexander II (known as the Tsar Liberator), in the centre of Sofia…
The artist explores the way contemporary art can propose counter-monuments while testing the limits of what memorials and monuments in general may achieve. Horses were originally domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian steppes circa 2200 BCE. Since then, they have been instrumentalised as an extension of ‘manliness and masculinity’, and ‘political hegemony’ against the barbarian, the foreigner, the other, or the intruder. In other words, they have been the direct witnesses of human-to-human crimes committed on this planet… for an exceedingly long time. Their distinctive presence—heightened by Boyadjiev’s intervention—emphasises the horse’s role as witness and animates the surrounding public space while stepping onto representations and understandings of power. It is also interesting that the artist is a man of 67; so, each intervention retains its own history in his personal archive of artistic encounters…
The programme of events, and the issues posed by the works, will be developed jointly by colleagues around Bulgaria, a team from the National Gallery, and others. The exhibition plans periodic extensive tours with the artist or the curators, to recount in greater detail the histories of monuments and problems of the public environment.
Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, exhibition curators
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

Solоist/s
Alina Mihaylova
Dilyana Spasova
Ensemble
Classic Art

Chamber Hall Solоist/s
Antonina Boneva
Martin Tsvetkov

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition

The Vera Nedkova House Museum
The programme, ‘In the Home of Vera Nedkova’, continues to present contemporary female artists in the cosy atmosphere of the artist’s apartment, marked by her intellectual and creative presence.
Denitsa Todorova was born in Plovdiv but has lived and worked in Antwerp for many years. Impressed by the museum in the centre of Sofia, she has prepared an exhibition titled ‘Metaphor for Memory’, an emotional return to and reflectiveness on memories and the past. The works offer a nuanced and symbolic exploration of the imaginary space where the sensitivity of women and their fragility and transformation are mirrored.
The project fills the Vera Nedkova House Museum with a fine, delicate energy that blends into the artist’s creative imagery. Her interpretive vision propounds the issue of underrepresented ‘stories’ of women in the history of art.
The focus in the artist’s oeuvre is on the hidden, intangible gestures and the ephemeral presence of subtle metaphorical scars.
Some of the abstract drawings were inspired by the museum itself and specifically created for the exhibition. They are executed on fine paper with layers of graphic powder.
Denitsa Todorova gradually removes part of it, exposing individual details in the completed work.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency
Diana Draganova-Stier, exhibition curator

The International Biennale of Glass celebrates its fifth edition, reaffirming its role as a leading showcase for contemporary glass art in Bulgaria and around the world.
Since its launch in 2017, it has increasingly attracted artists and spectators, becoming a forum for the exchange of ideas and cultural encounters.
Under its traditional slogan, ‘Together’, this year at the National Gallery / Kvadrat 500 the biennale presents some 200 works by artists from 50 countries – an impressive selection, uniting established and emerging creators, different generations and a diversity of techniques.
Highlights of the exhibition include works by Václav Cigler (Czech Republic), one of the most influential figures in the development of optical glass and conceptual sculpture; a blown glass artwork by the world-famous Dale Chihuly (USA); a vase with applied elements of mythological symbolism by the Murano master Lucio Bubacco (Italy), and a spatial analytical work by artist and architect Han de Kluijver (The Netherlands).
This edition includes several key collaborations, including the Franco-Bulgarian residency of artists Clara Rivault and Plamen Kondov held at CIRVA (Marseille), the New Bulgarian University and the National Academy of Arts, the visiting exhibition of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, and the participation of finalists from the Glass Cutting World Cup in Světlá nad Sázavou.
The Art Real K.L.M. Association organises the event in collaboration with the National Gallery and with the support of the Tianaderrah Foundation (USA), the New Bulgarian University, the French Institute in Bulgaria, the Italian Cultural Institute in Sofia, the ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ National Endowment Fund, the Czech Centre in Sofia, Chihuly Studio and Charles Parriott, and a number of galleries, institutions and individuals engaged in the development of contemporary art of glass.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
In the infinite multifariousness of images, Milko Pavlov discovers fragments: colourful segments, which he sticks together creating novel, different spaces. They do not belong to the present, nor do they tell the past. Pictorial dimensions have their own, singular time, added by the artist, unnamed, but certainly in the future. In Milko Pavlov’s case, the process of dating ‘in the future time’ has continued over the past twenty years.
Dating also appears in the titles of his works. It is not only inscribed on their reverse, but also on the walls of the gallery, infusing it in the same way as architecture is ‘present’ among the artist’s paintings. The artwork is no longer simply confined within its frame of a two-dimensional plane, but a pictorial field that emerges from the wall, blocks an intermediate door, and ‘climbs up’ a column. These small expositional teasers on the part of the curator are in response to the artist and his search for image/non-image, visible/invisible, or present/future.
This exhibition developed from several years of conversations between the artist and the curator from Sofia Arsenal. Milko Pavlov has lived and worked in Berlin for many years. He also travels frequently to Sofia. The artworks on display were produced especially for the museum, upon each of his returns to Bulgaria.
Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD

The National Gallery presents its unique collection of Western European textile panels (tapestries) for the first time. The tapestries dating from the 16th to 18th centuries—the golden period of the two most significant schools, the Flemish and the French—were added to the collection in the 1960s through the Bulgarian National Bank, in the depository of the then National Gallery of Decorative and Applied Arts. The exhibition in Hall 19, Kvadrat 500 is the result of several years of iconographic and attributional research of the artworks, along with restoration and conservation procedures.
Tapestries, these handwoven panels, extremely expensive to produce, with their colourful images, were used as both decoration and wall insulation in palaces and castles. In their splendour and as trappings of power and prestige, they adorned private and public spaces and became the exclusive property of the elite. The 16th century was the golden age of Flemish art, and Brussels emerged as the leading centre for tapestry manufacture. Series of frieze-like monumental thematic compositions with scenes from the Old Testament and Christian doctrine, as well as landscapes and allegorical images, were produced. The use of sources from ancient mythology was frequent, as exemplified in the exhibition by the ‘Romans and the Sabines’ set. By the middle of the century, tapestries were to become true woven paintings.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw the rise of the French tradition. During the reigns of Henri IV and Louis XIV, and by virtue of the initiative of the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the Royal Manufactories of Tapestry of Gobelins, Aubusson and Beauvais were founded. At that time, the best representatives of all the arts and crafts were recruited to glorify the absolute monarchy and to fulfil assignments for aristocrats, taking as their models works by artists such as Rubens, Simon Vouët, Charles Lebrun, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Charles-Joseph Natoire. The themes were inspired by religion, history, and mythology. One example of this is the tapestry titled ‘The Race of Atalanta and Hippomenes’, based on a tale from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The fashion of the time shaped entire salon furnishings with armchairs with woven upholstery depicting anthropomorphic animals based on the moralistic fables of Jean de La Fontaine, conveying timeless lessons on human nature and society. The taste for Orientalism was also apparent in the art of weaving, as illustrated here by two of Claude-Joseph Vernet’s tapestries.
The exhibition programme includes lectures, specialist tours and workshops dedicated to the technique of making tapestries, the restoration and conservation of ancient textiles, as well as activities targeted mainly at children and young people. A mobile digitised version of the exhibition is envisaged, to be presented by the State Cultural Institute of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Bulgarian diplomatic missions, to the Bulgarian Cultural Association in Brussels, as well as to the Museum of Textile Industry in Sliven, a branch of the National Polytechnic Museum, and to the history museums in Panagyurishte and Strelcha.
The study and preparation of the tapestries for this exhibition took more than a year in the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of the National Gallery, through funding from the Ministry of Culture and in partnership with the French Institute in Bulgaria and the National Academy of Arts.
Curator: Yoana Tavitian

The exhibition from Gaudenz B. Ruf’s donation includes contemporary works of art from Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegrо – painting, photography, objects and video — created between 1987 and 2019.
As the Ambassador of Switzerland to the country, and founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for New Bulgarian Art (2007–2019), Ruf has a long-standing bond with the Bulgarian art scene. The collection reflects his abiding interest in artists from different generations, selected for their sensitiveness to the social and political context in which they worked—from Kosta Bogdanović, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mihael Milunović and Sasho Stoitzov to Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev and Nestor Kovachev.
The exhibition exemplifies not only the collector’s taste, but also a regional and long-term commitment to the cultural scene on the Balkans. This donation to the National Gallery is an important gesture for Bulgaria, transforming one person’s attitude towards contemporary art into part of the cultural memory.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martina Yordanova, National Gallery

Kvadrat 500
Opening on 19 June (Thursday), from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM With the special participation of NASHTA.VERSIA – an audiovisual means of transport, probing the infinity of perceptions in risky impro acceleration
Having launched in 2020, the long-term project of the National Gallery ‘The Wall’ aims to present contemporary masters of mural painting and graffiti artists. On a specially designated wall in the atrium of Kvadrat 500 (with impressive dimensions of 2.40 x 27 m), the artists create monumental works in harmony with sculptural pieces by Alexander Dyakov, Pavel Koychev, Galin Malakchiev, and others, which are part of the representative museum exhibition.
Ivo Iliev Yeto is well known for a number of emblematic large-scale murals at key locations in Sofia. Through them, he creates stories in which nature, man and symbols interact in surreal situations, carrying multi-layered meaning and interpretation. With a pronounced interest in comics and graffiti since his childhood, Yeto still maintains his preference for magical subjects. His works have been realised far beyond the borders of the country – in Austria, Germany, Greece, France, etc.
In the space opposite the atrium, selection of small-format landscape compositions will also be displayed (June–August 2025), in which reality, magic and dream bring a special sense of timelessness. They are part of a larger series entitled ‘No Snooze Mornings’, in which the artist presents his searches and reflections on the fleeting moment between the end of dreaming and the moment of awakening – when human consciousness experiences a special kind of frustration at the inability to determine what is real and what is not.
Media partner: BTA / Bulgarian News Agency.
Martin Kostashki, curator of the exhibition