Bulgaria’s Participation in the Biennale in São Paulo in the 1960s

Abstract

The contribution deals with the Bulgarian participation in the dynamics of the Biennale in São Paulo in the 1960s. The international forum in Brazil, compared to biennales in Europe, opened the stage more widely to contemporary art on other continents, and hence to figurative imagery with the reworkings of local visual culture in the early 1960s, as well as to forms of engaged art, especially from Latin America. From a state of upsurge and growth, the Biennale came to attempt a boycott at the end of the decade, after the establishment of dictatorial rule. Although the Bulgarian collections, especially after the mid-1960s, stand in isolation as artistic issues, their consideration
within a broader picture of world art is of interest from today’s perspective.