“The Art of Collecting Time” is not merely an exhibition—it’s a thoughtful gesture of cultural memory. From 24 July to 5 October 2025, the National Gallery in Sofia presents, at The Palace, a remarkable donation by Swiss diplomat and patron Gaudenz B. Ruf, whose decades-long commitment to the contemporary art of the Balkans has shaped this carefully curated collection.
This is not a random assembly of works, but rather a visual archive of transition—social, political, and deeply personal. The donation includes paintings, photographs, installations, and video art created between 1987 and 2019 by artists from Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia. Among them are strong and distinctive voices such as Luchezar Boyadjiev, Sasho Stoitzov, Leda Ekimova, Kosta Tonev, Mihail Milunović, and Nestor Kovachev, whose work navigates the tensions of memory, identity, and artistic expression.
More than a diplomat who left his mark on Swiss-Bulgarian relations in the late 1990s, Gaudenz B. Ruf is a long-standing advocate for Bulgarian contemporary art, founder of the Gaudenz B. Ruf Award for emerging artists, and a collector whose vision sees collecting not as ownership, but as an act of care for cultural heritage. His donation to the National Gallery is a gesture of generosity—and responsibility—that embeds his personal curatorial narrative within the institutional story of art in Bulgaria.
Rather than imposing a single theme, the exhibition opens a polyphonic space, offering a layered reflection on the post-socialist condition and the questions that persist across generations. The works evoke social transformation, political critique, private reckoning, and a persistent inquiry into time and its traces.
The exhibition opens officially on 24 July at 6:00 PM, and will remain on view until 5 October. It invites visitors into a space where collecting becomes not a private endeavor but a shared territory—where the collector and the public meet, through art, in time.
Maria
admin
Български
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