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 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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Opera by Richard Wagner / Der Ring des Nibelungen
Duration 5:15 Intermission 2
Main Hall
Performed in German, with Bulgarian and English subtitles

Chamber Hall
Conductor
Konstantin Ilievsky
Solоist/s
Neda Atanasova
Mila Tsankova
Martin Iliev
Petya Dimitrova
Ralitsa Dimova
Georgi Georgiev
Ines Simeonova
Program
Arnold Schoenberg – Pierrot lunaire

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 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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Opera by Richard Wagner / Der Ring des Nibelungen
Duration 6:00 Intermission 2
Main Hall
Performed in German, with Bulgarian and English subtitles

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Alexander Vladigerov
Duration: 0:50 No intermission
Military academy - small
Performed in Bulgarian

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Military academy - small hall

Opera by Richard Wagner /Premiere/
Main Hall
Performed in German, with Bulgarian and English subtitles

Musical by Alexandar Raichev
Military academy - small
Performed in Bulgarian

Bulgaria Concert Hall
Conductor
Scott Terrel
Jaehyuck Choi
Daniel Esperante
Harmen Knossen
Kira Omelchenko
Catherine Lee
Reiko Nomura
Evan Harger
Solоist/s
Anthony Offerle
Igor Cognolato
Mary Mathews
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra
Program
Giuseppe Verdi – Overture from Opera “Nabucco”
Gage Lindsay – Survivor’s Guilt
Paul Richards – Breath of Life
Harmen Cnossen – Concerto for Piano and Orchestra Vitosha, I Mvt.
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy – The Hebrides Overture, Fingal’s Cave, Op. 26
Cécile Chaminade – Concertino for Flute and Orchestra
Yifan Shao – Little Piece for Orchestra
Reiko Nomura – Orienta Tonalytm

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Andrey Drenikov
Military academy - small hall
It is performed in Bulgarian

Opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – version adapted for children
Runnig time: 01:00
Military academy - small hall
Performed in Bulgarian

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Theatre Laboratory SFUMATO
Director: Margarita Mladenova
Translation: Antonia Parcheva
Scenography: Nikola Toromanov
Composer: Hristo Namliev
Photographer: Yana Lozeva
Actors: Svetlana Yancheva, Rashko Mladenov
...AND THE DAY DOESN'T END...
All the lofty dreams of the 20th century theater - from Antonin Artaud's yearning for the "destruction of appearances" to Peter Brook's "total theater" to Heiner Müller's "play with realities as subversion" - are embodied, happened in the dramaturgy of Samuel Beckett . His poetic "theatre machines" - both humans and fallen angels, trapped in their daily traps - buried in the earth; living in garbage cans or in cylinders - are a replica of the martyrs of Dante's "hell". Only punished without sin. Punished to live.
Beckett's theater can be called a cruel theater, a theater of the inevitable. Theater for the loser, "thrown" in existence, doomed to "eternal today".
Man, taken in his pure identity with the unanswered questions, the inflamed consciousness, powerless to untie the insoluble knots between his passing life and the all-pervading death. The things and the nothing.
The mouth as if gone mad, the language as a response to the absurd human being, broken by pauses during which it is seen - what?!
Pain as modus vivendi; as salvation from emptiness. The other as the only support.
Among the gallery of Beckett's clowns, a special place is occupied by the two "lucky ones" - Winnie and Willy.
Similar to the universal soul in Chekhov's “The Seagull”, Winnie doesn’t know "who she is and what awaits her," but she has embraced "the whole life, the whole life, the whole life" and bears its heavy blessing as a miracle to which she is responsible. Like a precious cup overflowing, not a drop of which should be wasted. No whine, no grunting.
There is hope in the hidden meaning of just you – being alive. Because "it could have been the eternal cold" without you.
Through her brave "something always remains" shines Beckett's great pity for the anonymous human being and his wonder at what "helps us live with our wounds." Nevertheless. So far.
Margarita Mladenova

Bulgaria Concert Hall
Conductor
Helin Beysuelen
John Koenig
Paulo Martins
William Birkbeck
Kira Omelchenko
Tyler Austin
Solоist/s
Mary Mathews
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra

Program Johann Strauss Jr. – Overture from Operetta “Die Fledermaus”
Cherise Leiter – The Flute of Felicity – Second movement from Four Proverbs
Antonio Celaya – Dancehall of the drunken Gods
Marrio Olinto – Querida
Ludwig van Beethoven – Overture Egmont
Luis Ruiz – Pacheco – The Creation of Adam – Second movement from “At the Sistine Chapel”
Xunze (Adam) Zhou – Twillight Shrouded the Teton Range

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Theatre Laboratory SFUMATO
Director: Ivan Dobchev
Composer: Assen Avramov
Scenography: Nikola Toromanov
Costumes: Suzy Radichkova
Actors: Malin Krastev, Neda Spasova, Stanislav Ganchev
Translated by Antonia Parcheva
Stage adaptation: Ivan Dobchev
Scenography: Nikola Toromanov and Ivan Dobchev
The decision is based on a scenographic idea by Ivan Dobchev, Boris Dalchev and Mihaela Dobreva.
Costumes: Suzy Radichkova
Composer: Asen Avramov
Malin Krastev – Krap at 69 years old.
Voice - Stanislav Ganchev, 39-year-old Krap.
Neda Spasova – Mouth
Nothing is more grotesque than unhappiness.
Nothing is more real than your own You.
Nothing is more essential than the inessential.
WE ARE NOT IN EXILE, WE ARE ON A MISSION!
"Through the WORDS he had gone to the edge of something straining towards Nothingness. Well, it finally reached that limit. To introduce the WORDS into Death or the Death into the WORDS - He already knows how it is. ONLY HE... It all begins in the first lines of "Moloy" when a stalker, probably Molloy himself, narrating in the first person, hidden on a height behind a rock , observes two people who meet on the way out of town. An unforgettable image. Coming from nowhere, going nowhere with their clownish gait, the two Beckett walkers feel watched, like Vladimir, like Winnie and Krapp, and that mad Mouth in “Not I”, and everyone else. There is something to be seen and said, poorly seen, poorly spoken. TO SEE THE SEEING, EYES INTO EYES. TO SAY WHAT IS SAID, WORDS WITHIN WORDS; on the day when the writer realizes that he must advance steadily in the direction - POORLY SEEN, EVEN WORSE SPOKEN - our Proust, our Joyce, our Céline, born in the second half of the century. But also our Dante, our Pascal, our Shakespeare."
Alfred Simon
I want to dedicate that interpretation of mine on Beckett to the memory of two of my dear friends -
Krikor Azarian and Naum Shopov, who in the sunset of the so-called "mature socialist realism" had dared to stage "Krapp’s Last Tape". An unforgettable show! I have no words to describe the effect it had on all our theatrical thinking at the time. I very much wish that our play would produce this effect on the present state of the theatre.
Ivan Dobchev

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Duration 2:00 Intermission 1
Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

A musical poem /Music by Father Kiril Popov/
St. Alexander Nevski Square
It is performed in Bulgarian with Bulgarian and English subtitles

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Bluestone Contemporary Ensemble

Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Duration 2:00 Intermission 1
Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

A musical poem /Music by Father Kiril Popov/
St. Alexander Nevski Square
It is performed in Bulgarian with Bulgarian and English subtitles

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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
Scott Terrel
Kira Omelchenko
Tyler Austin
Evan Harger
Simeon Pironkoff
Solоist/s
Samuil Zlatev
Rossen Idealov
Yotam Einstein
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra
Program
Samuel Sjostedt – Piece for Orchestra
Hubert Howe – Chairoscuro
David DeVasto – Memories of Moons and Stars
Guohao Li – The Memory of Snow for French Horn and Orchestra
Harry Bullow – Concertino for Clarinet and Orchestra
Maxwell Lu – Silt
Efrat Gerlich – The edge of the bridge
Aceryllo Chen – Piece for Orchestra
Martin Richardson – Zambomba! A Spanish Suite

Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Duration 2:00 Intermission 1
Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

A musical poem /Music by Father Kiril Popov/
St. Alexander Nevski Square
It is performed in Bulgarian with Bulgarian and English subtitles

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Duration 2:00 Intermission 1
Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Duration 2:00 Intermission 1
Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

Lake Stage, RIU Pravets Resort, Pravets, Bulgaria
Conductor Nayden Todorov
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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Pravets
Conductor
Nayden Todorov
Solоist/s
Monica Conesa
Maurizio Trejo
Ensemble
Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra
Program
Giacomo Puccini – Intermezzo from Opera “Manon Lescaut”
Giacomo Puccini – Aria of Cio-Cio-san (Un bel di vedremo), Act II from Opera “Madam Butterfly”
Giacomo Puccini – Duet of Tosca and Cavaradossi (“Mario,Mario”), Act I from Opera “Tosca”
Giacomo Puccini – Aria of Tosca (Vissi d’arte), Act II from Opera “Tosca”
Giuseppe Verdi – „Già nella notte densa“ – Duet of Otello and Desdemona, Act I from the Opera Otello
Giuseppe Verdi – “Dio! Mi Potevi Scagliar” – Otello’s Aria from Act III from the Opera Otello
Francesco Cilea – Aria of Adriana (Io son l’umile ancella) from the opera “Adriana Lecouvreur”
Francesco Cilea – Duet of Adriana and Maurizio “Ma dunque è vero”, Act II from the Opera “Adriana Lecouvreur”

Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Duration 2:00 Intermission 1
Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Duration 2:00 Intermission 1
Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

Scene on the square in front of the Municipality in Pravets
Conductor Nayden Todorov
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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg Alain Boublil
St. Alexander Nevski Square

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg Alain Boublil
St. Alexander Nevski Square

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg Alain Boublil
St. Alexander Nevski Square

Ballet by Sergei Prokofiev
Pancharevo Lake Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg Alain Boublil
St. Alexander Nevski Square

Ballet by Sergei Prokofiev
Pancharevo Lake Pancharevo Lake / next to Sredets National Rowing Base

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg Alain Boublil
St. Alexander Nevski Square

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg Alain Boublil
St. Alexander Nevski Square

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

Sofia Arsenal – Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Nadezhda Dzhakova, PhD
Bulgarian-born Mariana Vassileva has lived and worked in Germany for many years and has taken part in only a few exhibitions in her home country. Now the public have the opportunity to see her latest works, specially created for the museum space, as well as others not previously shown in Bulgaria, but included in museums and collections around the world.
Her solo exhibition includes sculptures, photographs, text, video art, and installations. Among this variety of media, the artist has sought the most accurate conceptual approach to realising her ideas. To the above, she has added light, which she transforms into an object.
In her works, she achieves a sense of aesthetic balance, poetry and beauty, a semantic echo of thinking and feeling resonating in her critical view of reality.
Vassileva’s exhibition began as an autobiographical account where childhood memories, her relationship with her mother and homeland all meet, but inevitably progressed to the political and social realities in which we live. ‘I am’ is now ‘we are’. Small personal slogans have become manifestos for freedom and human welfare.
What is it like, to live in a world devoid of empathy? For the artist, the most important is to remain yourself and to preserve your personal freedom, as she has emphasised through her work Be Yourself, which welcomes the viewer at the entrance to the museum. Flight is a daily necessity and a personal action that must be protected and defended…

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

Multimedia exposition dedicated to 150 years since the death of the Apostle of Freedom, Vasil Levski.
Using holographic technology on a large-scale video wall, a re-enactment of the trial of the Apostle of Freedom is displayed, and significant moments of his life are brought back to life. Veselin Plachkov portrays Vasil Levski. Actors Ivan Trenev, Lyubov Pavlova, Rumen Ivanov, Alexander Georgiev, Biser Marinov and Nikola Dodov are also participants. Nelly Dimitrova is the screenwriter; Dimitar Gochev, the director; Simeon Parashkevov and Dimitar Gochev, cinematographers; Atanas Gendov, composer; Pirina Veselinova, Evgeni Gospodinov and the Svetoglas Quartet, musical performers; sensor studio, animation and mapping; Hristo Karagyozov, audio mixing and post-production; Ivo Milev, creative producer; and Tsvetoslav Borisov, executive producer.
The National Gallery and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee created the exposition, with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and donations by the Lachezar Tsotsorkov Foundation, Kaufland Bulgaria EOOD, Aurubis Bulgaria JSC, Vazovski Machinery Works JSC – Sopot, and patriotic Bulgarians.
Kvadrat 500, entrance at 95, Vasil Levski Blvd., Sofia
Opening hours:
Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.– 6 p.m.
The screenings are 30 minutes away, starting at 10 am
Bookings for groups of up to 20 people: +359 879 834 025
FREE ADMISSION

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.

Musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg Alain Boublil
St. Alexander Nevski Square