National Endowment Fund "13th Century Bulgaria" at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with an Exhibition of Atanas Kachamakov "The Bread"
November 2020 – April 2021
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, lobby, ground floor
The exhibition "The Bread" by Atanas Kachamakov is part of the collection of NEF "13th Century Bulgaria" and visits the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the invitation of the State Institute for Culture to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the occasion of the Day of the National Awakeners.
The initiative is part of the partnership between the two institutions and aims to promote the Bulgarian artistic heritage.
The exhibition "The Bread" presents 30 drawings from the cycle "Our Daily Bread" by Atanas Kachamakov (1889-1994), accompanied by an author's text entitled "Bulgarian Festival of Mother Earth". The works are a visualized story about the life and work of the Bulgarian peasants from the beginning of the 20th century, about the ritual stages in the process of creating the bread during the different seasons. They are a kind of continuation of the novel "Good", first published in 1934 in the United States, written on the stories of Atanas Kachamakov about his childhood in his native Bulgaria, as he emigrated to the United States in the 1920s. In 1935, the novel won the John Newberry Gold Medal of the American Library Association for Children and Adolescent Literature.
Atanas Simov Kachamakov (1889-1984) was born in the famous gardening village of Lyaskovets. He studied law at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski ”, and later sculpture by Prof. Ivan Lazarov at the Academy of Arts in Sofia. He left Bulgaria and went to Paris. In 1924, together with his wife Alexandra, also an artist, he settled in New York. For his marble sculpture of an Indian woman with a child, he was honored at an exhibition organized in New York in 1931. After 1930, he worked for popular film productions in Los Angeles, then moved his studio to Palm Springs, where he worked for the rest of his life. He has solo exhibitions in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco. His works are in museums and private collections in the United States. In the early 80s of the twentieth century he returned to Bulgaria. He shows his works in exhibitions at the National Gallery, Sofia, and in Lyaskovets, which he donates through the NEF "13th Century Bulgaria".