Kvadrat 500
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- Sofia
- Posted 2 years ago
On May 28th, Bulgaria’s new national gallery, “Square 500” (KVADRAT 500), was formally inaugurated.
The gallery complex is situated in the capital city of Sofia, beside the Vassil Levski monument and behind the “St. Alexander Nevsky”cathedral.
It houses nearly 42,000 pieces of art from the National Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Foreign Art. The show has over 2,000 pieces of art, half of which are by Bulgarian artists and the other half by artists from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.
Except on Mondays, “Square 500” will be available to the public from 10 a.m. to 18 p.m. daily. The normal admission ticket is 10 BGN. Discounts are available for students and seniors.
History of Kvadrat 500
Petko Karavelov, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, proposed the building of a State Printing House, which was approved by the National Assembly on May 31, 1880. Friedrich Schwanberg, a Viennese architect, designed the building in Neoclassical style and built it between 1881 and 1883. During the air strikes over Sofia in the spring of 1944, the building on St Alexander Nevski Sq. was partly demolished. Parallel to its refurbishment in the late 1940s, a new building on Vasil Levski Blvd. was constructed to house the Technical University.
Nikola Nikolov renovated the former State Printing House in the early 1980s for the newly founded National Gallery of Foreign Art. By 1999, the concept of an architectural complex with museum functions, which incorporated both buildings, had begun to take shape. Yanko Apostolov, an architect, won the public design competition in 2010, and the rehabilitation was completed between 2012 and 2014.