To Pavel Koychev, form (form creation and metamorphosis) has always been paramount. Creating forms, placing them in a natural environment, and confronting them with the latter is his signature style. Featured in the natural or urban landscape, his creations look like aliens in their abodes, flying or ditched houses; schools of fish leaving their water environment trying to find their way on dry land; herds grazing on water; cows having failed to enter the concert hall… Aliens in a strange world whom we sympathize with. ‘Space does not need us’, says Pavel Koychev. Possible alternative forms in a world of necessities. This world can only be confronted by human imagination and the act of artistic creation.

For the fourth time, the Goethe-Institut Bulgaria and the Sofia City Art Gallery are spotlighting contemporary German photography with the work of Ulrich Wüst, following exhibitions featuring Sibylle Bergemann (2022), Barbara Klemm (2023), and Helga Paris (2024). The exhibition features over 120 photographs, primarily black-and-white archival pigment prints. Wüst’s professional experience as an urban planner and photo editor has shaped his distinctive photographic approach—analytical, precise, and rigorously composed—with his interest focused not so much on historical ruins or traces of war as on the absurdities and contradictions arising from urban planning —the demolition of existing architecture, indiscriminate construction, and the critical transformation of the urban environment. Through his neutral, mostly black-and-white images, he constructs a distinctive visual critique of architecture that lacks a direct ideological position.