The Burgas Artists' Society at 22 Alexandrovska Street opens sculptor Stoyan Valkov's exhibition "Return" today, September 28, at 6 p.m., organisers say. Valkov is showing his work to Bulgarian audiences again after nearly four decades in Poland and the United States. Valkov was born in 1957 in Ekzarh Antimovo. He studied painting and sculpture at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, then went on to build his career in the United States. He works in sculpture, painting, relief and drawing, turning industrial metal into sculpted forms that deform and simplify the human figure. His abstract canvases build on composition, line, blocks of colour, light and texture. He has also spent more than 30 years developing his own welding technique. From 1998 to 2003 he worked at the Modern Art Foundry in New York, handling the final finishing and technical completion of large-scale works, including Louise Bourgeois's "Maman / Spider". Among his larger series are "The Fate of the Gypsies" and "Bulgarian Girl", along with the conceptual "New York / The 9/11 Memorial". He also makes abstract paintings, reliefs and bronze human figures. He has exhibited in Poland and the United States, and his work is held in private collections, galleries and museums in Bulgaria, Poland, the United States and Sweden. Organisers describe "Return" as both the exhibition's title and the artist's personal reckoning — a meeting point between what he gathered abroad and a fresh start back home. The show's introduction says his art centres on the human being: their freedom, inner strength, vulnerability and memory, and the pull between roots and the wider world. The title carries personal weight for Valkov, who has chosen to keep working in Bulgaria, near the Black Sea coast.