The first museum building housing the National Gallery is the Palace. Currently, its halls host temporary exhibitions featuring Bulgarian and foreign art. Constructed immediately after Bulgaria’s liberation from Ottoman rule in 1878 and the selection of Sofia as the capital in 1879, the palace served as the seat of the Council of Ministers after September 9, 1944. In 1953, the state designated the former palace for the National Art Gallery and the National Ethnographic Museum. The National Gallery, a state cultural and scientific institute of national importance, operates as a permanent representative exhibition in “Kvadrat 500.”
The National Gallery engages in various activities, including collecting, studying, preserving, and presenting movable cultural values and works of contemporary Bulgarian and foreign visual art. This involves collecting, storing, protecting, and documenting collections and organizing exhibitions. The museum is also working on digitizing its main and exchange funds formed through its primary activities. Legal and physical protection for movable cultural values and contemporary artworks in its possession is ensured.
Exhibition, research, and educational activities include maintaining a permanent exhibition, organizing temporary exhibitions nationally and internationally, and conducting programs for different social and age groups with educational, aesthetic, and educational purposes. The National Gallery has several branches, each with its temporary and permanent exhibitions, including the Dvoretsa Branch, the Branch “Crypt of the Temple-monument St. Alexander Nevsky,” the “Socialist Art” Branch, the Contemporary Art Branch “Sofia Arsenal,” and the House-museums “Vera Nedkova,” “Nikola Tanev,” and “Ivan Lazarov.”
For more information, you can visit the official website of the National Gallery: https://nationalgallery.bg/bg/,
the official website of the branch for contemporary art “Sofia Arsenal”: https://sofiaarsenal-mca.org/,
Facebook page of the National Gallery: https://www.facebook.com/NationalArtGallery/
Facebook page of the Department of Educational Programs of NG https://www.facebook.com/NationalArtGalleryEducation/.
