Art Gallery Balchik

The Art Gallery of Balchik is the oldest art gallery in Southern Dobruja, located in the centre of the town of Balchik, at 4 Otets Paisiy Street, in Balchik Municipality, Dobrich Region. The gallery has its origins in the 1930s, when Balchik — then within the borders of Romania and chosen by Queen Maria as her southern summer residence — had become one of the principal cultural centres of Romania, attracting Romanian intellectuals and artists captivated by the town's antiquity, picturesque beauty, and Oriental exoticism. In those years one could already speak of a Balchik School of Painting. In 1937 a small building near the fishing harbour was converted into a museum-gallery — the first of its kind in all of Southern Dobruja. When Southern Dobruja was returned to Bulgaria in 1940, the Romanian authorities took all movable cultural assets from the museum and gallery with them, loading them aboard the ship Oitus and exporting them to Romania. In the following years the local community gradually rebuilt the cultural institutions of the town. In 1965, with a donation of 76 works of painting, graphics, and sculpture from the National Art Gallery in Sofia, and contributions from local residents, the first post-war exhibition — titled "Balchik and the Sea" — was opened. The gallery's current building, the former high school of Balchik, was reconstructed with funds from the "1300 Years of Bulgaria" national fund and the gallery moved into it in 1987; it was then fully renovated again in 2015 with a new interior conceived by architect Ivo Popov, incorporating the characteristic materials of Balchik — stone and wood.The gallery occupies a floor area of 800 square metres spread over two floors. The ground floor houses five halls for temporary and visiting exhibitions and a hall dedicated to foreign art; in the central hall stands a statue of the god Dionysus — a replica of a Greek original discovered in the town in 1945, a symbol of the city's ancient name Dionysopolis — and the foyer screens films related to art and the history of Balchik. The second floor contains the permanent exhibition of the most significant works by Bulgarian artists, structured in two periods: art from the first half of the 20th century and art from the second half of the century. The permanent collection is oriented primarily towards marine themes and unique landscapes of old Balchik painted by Bulgarian classics, alongside portraits, still lifes, and graphics. It also includes works by Romanian artists who painted Balchik during the period 1919–1940, and the notable collection of works donated over ten years by the celebrated Bulgarian caricaturist Todor Tsonev — drawings, lithographs, caricatures, graphics, and 108 issues of the satirical newspaper Satira. The Balchik-born sculptor Boris Karadzhov (1906–1982) — whose talent was recognised by the great Romanian sculptor Storck — is also represented; Karadzhov graduated from the Bucharest Academy of Fine Arts in 1932, where he later became a professor, and donated his work "Pieta" to the gallery at its opening. The gallery hosts annual national and international plein-air sessions and exhibitions, among them the European Horizon and International Plein-Air events.