An exhibition called "A Stop in Burgas (With a Scops Owl)" will run in Burgas from October 2 to October 30, 2026, showing work by artists Daniel Bozhkov and his daughter Rosa Bozhkov. The two made the pieces together during five weeks in the city, taking in old streets, chance encounters and the poems of Petya Dubarova.

Father and daughter see Burgas through different eyes. Daniel Bozhkov was born and raised there and draws on his childhood memories, while for Rosa the city means the summer holidays she spent with her Bulgarian family.

In the summer of 2026 the pair spent five weeks in Burgas, painting in a makeshift studio at the Youth Cultural Center on Gladstone Street. They didn't have the space to themselves — they shared it with climbers, ballet dancers, yoga and judo groups, Spanish dance classes and members of the Strandzha professional folk ensemble.

One place mattered more than any other during those weeks: the house of poet Petya Dubarova, right across from the center. Daniel and Rosa went there almost every day and read her poems out loud to each other. That connection shows up in the exhibition too — among the works are Daniel's "The Dubarov Family Wardrobe" and Rosa's "Water Bucket."

Other pieces come straight from what the two of them saw and felt in the city, like Rosa's "Balconies" and Daniel's "Lovers' Alley."

One part of the show has a story behind it nobody expected. The Bulgaria Hotel gave the artists old bedsheets, and at first they planned to use them just as rags while they painted. But the fabric turned out to be too good for that, so instead of wiping their brushes on it, they turned the sheets into plain white canvases — a nod to non-figurative art, to Kazimir Malevich's "White on White" and to Robert Ryman's white paintings.

The exhibition's title also comes from that summer. On evening walks toward the Lazur complex, Daniel and Rosa kept hearing a scops owl living somewhere among the apartment blocks. They started whistling back, and it slowly turned into something like a conversation between them and the bird. For the two artists, it became another way of connecting with Burgas — not just through images and memories, but through the sounds of the city itself.

Daniel Bozhkov is a Bulgarian-American artist based in New York. He studied mural painting at the National Academy of Art in Sofia under professor Mito Ganovski, then earned a master's degree in fine art at Hunter College in New York. He works across media, from fresco to performance and video, often bringing in experts from other fields for his projects and working directly in public spaces.

He has held a Guggenheim fellowship as well as grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation. His work has shown at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, the 6th Liverpool Biennial and the 9th Istanbul Biennial. He teaches as a professor of visual arts at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Rosa Bozhkov is an American artist based in New Haven, Connecticut. She studied art and urban studies at Vassar College and holds a master's degree in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art.

Her paintings and drawings mix what she observes, imagines and remembers — recognizable images sit next to fields of pure color. She has held residencies at the Royal Drawing School's Dumfries House in Scotland and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through its Currents program. Her work has been shown in New York, New Haven, Philadelphia and Richmond, and she has received the Amy Tatro Award and the Royal Drawing School Award from Yale University.

Rosa Bozhkov teaches as a visiting professor of painting and drawing at the University of Connecticut.

"A Stop in Burgas (With a Scops Owl)" runs from October 2 to October 30, 2026.