An exhibition entitled “Europe in Bulgaria – Reflections of European Artistic Trends in Bulgarian Art from the Liberation to the Middle of the 20th Century” is on at Sofia City Art Gallery until February 16 2025.
The exhibition traces the reflections of European artistic trends on Bulgarian post-liberation art.
It includes works by some of the most significant Bulgarian artists: Nikola Petrov, Nikola Tanev, Goshka Datsov, Boris Georgiev, Ivan Milev, Nikolay Rainov, Ivan Lazarov, Kiril Tsonev, Ivan Nenov, Sirak Skitnik, among others.
“The dialogue between Bulgaria and Europe in the specified period was extremely dynamic, multilateral and continuous,” the gallery said.
“It reveals a complex and highly intricate network of connections between personalities, events, art centres, trends, works, cultural phenomena.”
The gallery said that an indisputable fact was the desire to include Bulgarian artists in European art with the clear awareness and self-confidence that Bulgaria was part of Europe and that the European path was the path of young Bulgarian art.
The first trend was the shift from late Revival art to academicism.
“The artworks demonstrate that Bulgarian authors coped with the assimilation of this tendency extremely quickly. A necessity for change came to the fore,” the gallery said.
“New trends (impressionism, expressionism, etc.) related to the desire to convey a certain state infiltrated the local art world. In parallel, another trend strongly influenced by secession and symbolism began to develop and address the topical issue of the native in Bulgarian art of the 1920s.”
In the following decades, attention once again shifted to the visible reality and to the topics related to the growing modern city, the gallery said.
The interest in reality exemplified by the works of Bulgarian artists from the 1930s was a general tendency in the European artistic space, developing in different dimensions and in different artistic centres (New Objectivity, metaphysical painting).
Several main threads constantly intertwine in the presented exhibition: the drive for modernization, the problem of the native and the question of visible reality and its recreation, Sofia City Art Gallery said.