About the Place
Square 500 is the name of the new Bulgarian National Gallery.
The gallery is located near the monument to Vassil Levski, behind St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, making it a convenient tourist stop.
The National Gallery Square 500 houses a collection of over 42,000 works of art from the National Art Gallery and the National Gallery for Foreign Art. The exhibition has about 2,000 art works, half of which are by Bulgarian artists and the other come from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
The National Gallery for Foreign Art’s collection is unique – the art of distant lands, of exotic tribes and nations, of old and new ages coexists with the modern European tendencies, with traditional and religious pictorial principles in the chronological span of a millennium. The European graphic school prevails in the collection, and of more limited scope is the art of USA, Latin America and Asia, except for two especially valuable collections of works of the traditional Japanese woodblock printing, Ukiyo-e, and Indian miniature paintings.
As a general architectural silhouette, the western Gallery building is a reconstruction of the old State Printing House designed by architect Friedrich Schwanberg from Vienna, which was partially destroyed by bombings during the World War II. Its appearance today, conformed to the functions of a modern gallery, is the work of famous Bulgarian architects, artists, art historians and arrangers.
Square 500has at it`s disposal magnificent halls, multi-media equipment and other conveniences, very suitable for organizing different kinds of cultural, social and business enterprises.