The Odyssey of a Spiritual Nomad—Touches to the Portrait of Zlatko Paunov,
On 13 December 2025, an exhibition titled ‘The Odyssey of a Spiritual Nomad—Touches to the Portrait of Zlatko Paunov’, opened at the Gabenski Gallery, the NEF ‘13 Centuries of Bulgaria’ regional centre.
The Fund’s donor Zlatko Paunov is well known to the Tryavna public. Thanks to him, the town’s Museum of Asian and African Art was founded. With this exhibition, the organisers present the creativity of his inner world, which he had kept in the shadows for long. The artist travelled around Asia with the goal of voyaging and exploring, in order to share his discoveries. Thanks to his searches, he managed to effect his charitable mission and, through the donations he made to the Municipality of Tryavna, he succeeded in preserving unique cultural worlds.
The exhibition includes some 40 archival photographs taken in the second half of the 1970s. Through them, Paunov has touched on everything that had excited him: old streets, hands of craftsmen, and silhouettes of merchants and strangers who gradually transform into symbols, come to life before the viewer. With the perceptions of a traveller, the artist had masterfully captured the dances, gestures, and rituals, that he witnessed. The exhibition also includes stills of his New York studio, where he had worked before sculpting the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, erected in the plaza near the Ferry Building in San Francisco.
Each photograph carries its own story. And, even if the places and people in the shots are no longer the same, contemplation is a way to return, a feeling of slowing down time, an opportunity for meditation and rediscovery of the artist’s experiences.
The exhibition runs until 28 December 2025.