Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria. It is situated in the Sofia Valley at the foot of the Vitosha mountain in the western parts of the country. The city is built west of the Iskar river, and has many mineral springs, such as the Sofia Central Mineral Baths. It has a humid continental climate. Being in the centre of the Balkans, it is midway between the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea, and closest to the Aegean Sea.
A number of ancient civilizations, including the Thracians, ancient Greeks, Scythians, Celts, ancient Romans, Goths, Slavs, Varangians and the Bulgars have left their mark on the culture, history and heritage of Bulgaria. Due to this great variety of influences, Bulgaria has adopted many unusual traditions. Thracian artifacts include numerous temples, tombs, golden treasures and ancient rites and rituals, while the Bulgars have left traces of their heritage in statehood, early architecture, music and dances. Thracian rituals such as the Tryphon Zarezan which is dedicated to Saint Tryphon of Campsada, Kukeri and Martenitsa are to this day kept alive in the modern Bulgarian culture. The oldest treasure of worked gold in the world, dating back to the 5th millennium BC, comes from the site of the Varna Necropolis.
Shahabuddin Ahmed is a Bangladeshi painter. He was awarded the Chevalier De L'ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres by the Ministry of Cultural Affair and Communication of France in 2014. He was the recipient of Independence Day Award by the Government of Bangladesh in 2000. His paintings are displayed in galleries like Olympic Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland, Municipal Museum of Bourg-en-Bresse, France, Seoul Olympic Museum, South Korea, the National Taiwan Museum and Bangladesh National Museum.
Liam Gillick is a British artist who lives and works in New York City. Gillick deploys multiple forms to make visible the aesthetics of the constructed world and examine the ideological control systems that have emerged along with globalization and neoliberalism. He utilizes materials that resemble everyday built environments, transforming them into minimalist abstractions that deliver commentaries on social constructs, while also exploring notions of modernism.
The National Art Gallery is Bulgaria's national gallery, and houses over 50,000 pieces of Bulgarian art.
Ivan Minekov is one of the most appreciated contemporary Bulgarian sculptors. He lives and works in Sofia.
Omer Fast is a contemporary artist.
Seth Price is a New York City-based multi-disciplinary post-conceptual artist. He lives and works in New York City.
Keraca Visulčeva, was a Macedonian and Bulgarian artist who was born in Nestram, in the Manastir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. Her family moved to Pomorie, Bulgaria, during the Balkan wars, as many Macedonian immigrants did during the same period.
Ruth Sacks is a South African artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the South African Research Chair Initiative (SARChI) for Social Change at Fort Hare University. Sacks holds a PhD (Arts) from the University of the Witwatersrand where she was a fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER). Her third artist book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under Seas, was launched in 2013. She is a laureate of the HISK in Ghent. She was one of the facilitators of the artist-run project space the Parking Gallery, hosted by the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) in Johannesburg. Ruth Sacks' work has been presented internationally in venues such as the African Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennalein 2007, the ZKM Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe in 2011 and the National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi in 2017.
The MTA Foundation is a non-profit cultural institution, which is part of the Israeli M.T. Abraham Group. Its headquarters are in Tel Aviv, Israel, and its part of the collection is on permanent display in Mostar. Its stated intent is to promote public appreciation of the most important styles of Modernism: Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Cubo-Futurism, Futurism, Constructivism and Suprematism by collecting pieces that can be loaned "for the sole purpose of display and study by public institutions," and to present most effectively the first half of the 20th century, a period that saw revolutionary tendencies shape the art scene.
Ivan Yanakov is a Bulgarian-born pianist and conductor. He has performed on four continents, with a repertoire ranging from the Baroque era to contemporary.
Krassimir Terziev is a Bulgarian visual artist, living and working in Sofia. He works with a broad range of media including video, photography, installation and drawing.
Boryana Rossa is a Bulgarian interdisciplinary artist and curator making performance art, video and photographic work.
Alexander Telalim is a Ukrainian and Bulgarian visual artist. He graduated from the Grekov Odesa Art School in Odesa, Ukraine, and then from the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. He lives and works in Sofia.
Olivier Boissiere was a French writer and commentator of contemporary art and architecture. His profiles, comments, features and interviews had been published in international magazines such as Domus, Abitare, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui and Vogue Paris. Boissiere was the author of several books about the works of Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Le Corbusier, Ron Arad and Philippe Starck. He was on Jean Nouvel's team for more than ten years and served as an advisor and consultant to different architecture projects such as the winning entry of the team Sou Fujimoto+Manal Rachdi for the "Reinventer Paris" competition.
Ivan Vukadinov is a Bulgarian painter. Considered "one of the greatest of Bulgarian artists," he was one of the 25 artists selected for the monograph series published by the National Endowment of the Arts. Vukadinov has resurrected an encaustic technique used in ancient Egypt for making Fayum mummy portraits. His art references Etruscan, Egyptian, Thracian, Greek and Roman art. Vukadinov is the first Bulgarian artist whose work has been acquired by the Vatican Museums.
Elisaveta Konsulova-Vazova was one of the first women to become a professional artist in Bulgaria. She is also credited with being the first Bulgarian woman to paint a nude figure at the State School of Painting and the first woman to host a solo exhibition in Bulgaria. Having studied abroad, she became a noted art critic, publishing articles focused on Bulgarian culture and women's participation in the arts.
Christoph Girardet is a German filmmaker and artist. He lives and works in Hanover.
