[size=85:omsm9yu7]Sofia Echo Fri, Aug 26

National Art Gallery in Sofia to close for four months

hirty thousand exhibits, including large numbers of valuable paintings, are being put into storage as the National Art Gallery in Sofia closes for four months of renovations.

The gallery will close on August 28 2011.

Already, restorers are busy working with art storage experts, cleaning and preparing artworks for mothballing in various places in the Bulgarian capital city.

The gallery has about 4000 paintings in its possession, although less than half of these were actually in the building – formerly a royal palace – with the rest already being kept elsewhere.

The three million leva renovation project will see repairs from basement to roof.

It is the largest-scale transformation of the former royal palace since 1954, when the then-communist state designated it for use by the national gallery and the Ethnographic Museum.

Some of the National Art Gallery’s works are to go on travelling exhibitions, while some will go on temporary loan to the new Museum of Socialist Art, on Lachezar Stanchev Street in the Izgrev borough, near the Sofia office of the traffic police.

In the long term, the National Art Gallery’s collection will go to the planned "
Bulgarian Louvre"
, officially the National Museum for the Visual Arts, for which the groundbreaking ceremony was held in April 2010.