An exhibit of artworks, selected at the second call under the Ministry of Culture's project for buyout of visual artworks and gallery format sculptures, was opened Tuesday at the Multimedia Center 'Mala Stanica' - part of Macedonia's National Gallery.
Forty-three paintings and 18 sculptures of 16 authors have been bought out under the second call, signed by a total of 52 authors.
The project is part of the National Strategy for Cultural Development (2013-2017), which aims to enrich the artwork funds the Museum of Contemporary Art, Macedonia's National Gallery and other institutions.
A total of 113 paintings and sculptures were bought out since the project's launch in 2014, for which budget funds of MKD 13,38 m (over EUR 200,000) had been allocated, the Culture Minister Elizabeta Kanceska Milevska said at the exhibit's opening ceremony.
"We have bought out works of authors that contributed substantially to the development of fine arts in Macedonia and becoming aware of their own code of value went beyond the borders of our country to conquer the European cultural space," Kanceska Milevska said.
The exhibited paintings and sculptures are works of art of prominent Macedonian artists, such as Vangel Kodzoman, Ljubomir Belogaski, Tomo Sijak, Ivan Velkov, Tomo Vladimirski, Dragutin Avramovski Gute, Irena Paskali, Antoni Maznevski, Vasil Vasilev...
This project has been a new approach to supporting domestic artists, said the leader of the ruling party VMRO-DPMNE, Nikola Gruevski, who initiated it two years ago as then prime minister in cooperation with Kanceska-Milevska.
"They (the artists) did not enjoy such assistance in the previous years and in the spirit of supporting the Macedonian art, we decided then as government to offer an opportunity the Ministry of Culture to buyout each year a certain number of artworks. This trend will continue, namely artists can be certain that this political structure appreciates and supports art and will keep doing so in the future", Gruevski said.