10 Years of History

Gallery Loran’s first salon opened its doors in Sofia on 6, August 2006, at 31, General Parensov Str.

In less than three years, the renovated ground floor apartment became a prestigious place for exhibitions and meetings of the cultural elite of Sofia. At the end of April 2009, we did not renew our rental contract and left the premises. We moved our business to an office on Yantra Street. We did this without any excessive ostentation or fuss, avoiding media attention. All this mainly affectedthe public in Sofia.

For two years, our work was exclusively targeted on our clients, to whom we paid special attention in a more confidential environment. We organised exhibitions only in external premises.

The exhibition of monotypes – ‘Colour Symphony’ – was our major event dedicated to the 111th. anniversary of the birth of Vasil Evtimov, and was held at the National Assembly.

The restructuring of our activities was the main reason to set up a website in order to make it possible for connoisseurs of Bulgarian art, both in our country and around the world, to have online access to Loran. Thus, we are now following more confidently the path that we set out on from the beginning, not only to trade in art, but to discover, present and tell new stories in the vast fields of our own cultural memory.

We are fortunate to be among the few who follow family traditions and continue our long-standing friendships with the families of the great names in our painting, such as Zlatyu Boyadzhiev, Vasil Barakov, Vasil Ivanov, Vasil Stoilov, Vasil Evtimov, Boris Dankov, Margarita Milidzhiyska, Georgi Zhelezarov, Genko Genkov, Petko Zadgorski, Petko Abadzhiev, and many others.

The date of 7 September 2011 is the most important in our short history. We opened our new gallery on the famous street – 16, Oborishte Str. in Sofia. The exhibition ‘Loran – the Continuation’ was an exciting event showing that Sofia’s cultural elite was ready to immediately acceptits new space.

Our home is located on the ground floor of the house of the famous Koprivshtitsa family of the Bulgarian National Revival, Hadji Nayden Kalachev, who, in 1813, built the Kalachev Bridge in Koprivshtitsa, which became known decades later as the ‘First Gunshot Bridge’. In 1912, his followers, Petar and Poliksena Kalachev, built the house on the junction of Oborishte and Vasil Aprilov streets, which, after a long search, proved to be the most suitablelocation for our gallery.

Thus, with the feeling that we are bringing together the histories of two great Bulgarian families and, led by the name of our patron Tsanko Lavrenov, with his pseudonym of Loran chosen as the name of the gallery and our trademark, we look forward to continuing our fruitful and successful work in the name of art and the development of the market in the country and worldwide.

Drawing on the tradition and the memory of the past and those before us, we chose as its name the pseudonym of Loran, which, at the beginning of the last century, the famous Bulgarian artist Tsanko Lavrenov (1896–1978) used as his signature. Thanks to their broad-minded outlook, the great Bulgarian intellectuals of his generation lived and worked with the awareness of the native as part of the common European heritage.

We established Gallery Loran in order to participate actively in the artistic life and art market of Bulgaria.

We chose the role of a mediator – to position ourselves between the connoisseur collector and the work of art and its artist.

Our task is not only to present the exhibits in a perfect state, but also to collect information about their history and destiny, to provide it correctly to our clients, to assist them in finding the appropriate artwork, and at the same time, to see to it that every artwork finds its owner.

And because we do not want to turn our backs on anything that has happened and is currently happening in the cultural life of Bulgaria, we decided that we would work with artists and artistic legacies from the late 19th century to the present day.