EGO DEATH

EGO DEATH

 Yavor Boyanov

12.06 – 1.07. 2025

 

“Ego Death” is the fourteenth solo exhibition by Yavor Boyanov and the first in which the artist turns to fully abstract painting. Inspired by the psychedelic era of the 1960s and ’70s of 20th century, and the ideas of expanded consciousness and inner revelation, Boyanov creates a series of works signed under the pseudonym Psychonaut.

The exhibition marks the final part of an unofficial trilogy, following two previous shows — “The Aeon of the Postartist” (2018) and “The Flesh, or the Absurd Existence of Unconscious Pieces of Meat” (2024) — which explore opposing poles of human experience: the spiritual awakening and the degradation of the body. If “The Aeon” introduces the figure of the Sacred Child as a conduit of transcendence, and the creatures in “The Flesh” symbolize the loss of spirit, then “Ego Death” brings this opposition to full dissolution — through a rejection of concrete imagery, narrative, and even identity.

At the heart of the exhibition lies an abstract presence without body or face, provisionally named The Psychonaut — a figure not visualized but perceptibly present. He is not a character within the paintings, but rather the one who has seen, traversed, and left behind traces of the journey. Thus, the author disappears entirely behind the pseudonym — not as an act of concealment, but as a deliberate distancing from authorship in its traditional sense. Drifting through ego disintegration, The Psychonaut is a recorder of inner landscapes. He is pure awareness, moving through explosions of form, color, and fragments of the unknown.

The paintings in Ego Death portray a journey without beginning or end, attempting to convey the pulse of transformation.

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Ego death is a state of complete loss of the sense of individuality and separateness, in which the boundaries between the self and the external world dissolve. It is described as a transcendent experience where conventional notions of identity, time, and space fade away. In this process, one may encounter a profound merging with all existence — a sense of infinite peace and an awareness of the interconnectedness of everything. Ego death may be brought about through meditation, spiritual practice, psychedelics, or extreme life events, and often leads to deep inner transformation.

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