Venice hailed a UN decision from mid-December to put the art of glass beads on its Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage and expressed hope it would help artisans hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Ivan Kostov creates sculptures for architectural environments and architectural design. He studied ceramics at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, from which he graduated in 1986. His works are module structures that he describes as meant to cause at a subconscious level “an exhilarating feeling of joy and satisfaction of what is happening in them”.

Little Bird Place Gallery in Sofia presents a group exhibition of 20 contemporary Bulgarian artists, limited to creating in 20x20 cm format, but without external interference in their internal state. The format is special and challenging, symmetrical and open to interpretation. Set not only to commemorate this unprecedented year, but also born of the need to accept our limitations in order to find new ways to break and overcome them.

A painting by a teacher from the town of Vidin, in northwestern Bulgaria, has been featured on the official Facebook page of the Van Gogh Museum (https://www.facebook.com/VanGoghMuseum/), which is located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. So far, Yuliana Chavdarova's work, Morning at Grafa (as the Graf Ignatiev Str. in downtown Sofia is often referred to), has over 15,000 likes and more than 200 comments. It has been shared over 1,500 times.

To tell the troubling story of the Netherlands’ deep historical links to the slave trade, the country’s national museum is making it personal. The Rijksmuseum will open a major exhibition on the subject in February, AP reported.

On the occasion of the Contemporary Art Day, H.E. Stefano Baldi, Ambassador of the Republic of Italy to Bulgaria and Ms Verena Vittur, Director of the Italian Institute of Culture in Sofia, opened on 5 December an exhibition of photographs by Gustav Willeit, entitled "Natu.rae / DOLOMITI".

Why So Serious is the title of a solo exhibition by New York-based Bulgarian artist Houben Tcherkelov opening doors to visitors of the House of Humor and Satire museum in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. In addition to new works, Tcherkelov, who is best known for his paintings of people depicted on banknotes and coins, is showing sculptures created between 2002 and 2019 with this latest display.

Emanuela Kovach, one of the most prominent Bulgarian graphic artists of her generation, presents her exhibition The Needle's Tip at the Museum Gallery Anel in Sofia. The title is not chosen accidentally. It leads directly to the engraving method of intaglio printing - “dry needle”, which Kovach has been using for many years. This is a method that takes us back in time - to the 15th century and to Albrecht Durer.

The Sofia City Art Gallery displays works by great Bulgarian artists dedicated to Mount Athos. The exhibition is titled Garden of Spirituality and presents the Holy Mountain's monasteries and cultural heritage, seen through the eyes of Bulgarian artists from the early to mid-20th century. Among them are Ivan Lazarov, Dechko Uzunov, Tsanko Lavrenov, Konstantin Shtarkelov, Vasil Zahariev, etc. Having visited Mount Athos for one reason or another, each of them recreated in their own style their various impressions of its monasteries and relics, the everyday life of monks, and the place's rich cultural heritage.

The Little Bird Place gallery in Sofia is showing an exhibition with the latest painting experiments of Kaliya Kalacheva. Known for her work on themes of urban environment and its rigid constructions, the artist has become increasingly tempted over the past few years by a transition to nature and the multi-layered character of landscapes. Kaliya suggests a different concept for landscape. It raises the need for “a change of scenery” - the idea of landscape as one of the oldest genres in fine arts, but one that also requires constant updating in order to reflect the present.