The exhibition "Mount Athos in Sofia" by the renowned Greek-Austrian artist Makis Varlamis (1942–2016) is hosted at the National Palace of Culture as part of the autumn salon "Salon of the Arts." This large-scale exhibition is a joint initiative of His Holiness Bulgarian Patriarch Daniel and the NDK, realized with the participation of the Mount Athos Photoarchive, the Austrian Art Museum, and the Experimental Workshop Vergina.
The exhibition is open from October 5 to November 15
Opening hours: Every day from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM and from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM.
📍Floor 3, Center, Entrance A3
The exhibition includes: 50 monumental canvases created by the late Makis Varlamis, the installation "The Prayer of the Monks," a copy of a monastic bell, as well as portraits of monks from the collection of the Mount Athos Photoarchive.
Painter, sculptor, architect, and educator, Varlamis is among the authors whose work blurs the boundaries between traditional sacred art, contemporary design, and spatial experiments. For Makis Varlamis, Mount Athos is the guardian of Orthodox spirituality, where Light, harmony, and the quest for the Divine are the main pillars.
The exhibition serves as a visual window into this hard-to-reach sacred world, allowing each viewer to touch the atmosphere of monastic asceticism and the untouched architectural-natural reality. In his artistic language, Varlamis demonstrates academic precision, while consciously deforming space and buildings. This is not a defect, but a strict adherence to the sacred canon of reverse perspective, according to which spiritual space does not obey physical and linear laws — it is eternal and transcends human sensory limitations.
The exhibition presents the monasteries not just as architectural objects, but as material markers for the preservation of faith. Makis Varlamis combines classical details and realism with monumental expressionism, and some of the landscapes and portraits of monks seem to belong to another, metaphysical world. All of this transforms his works into "visual theology" — a dynamic plastic dialogue that combines Greece's historical identity, contemporary visual language, and humanity's eternal longing for Divine light.