In 2015, the world-famous artist Nikola Manev made a great gesture to the residents of Troyan, donating  25 paintings. They are displayed in the exhibition hall of the Information and Cultural Center, where visitors can touch to the inspiration and variety of pictures painted during different creative periods of the artist, reflecting both the modernity we are used to associate with his name and his return to the realism in later years.

Nikola Manev is a Bulgarian artist who lives and works in Paris, France. Manev graduated from the Art School in Sofia, and in 1962 he was admitted to the French Academy of Fine Arts where he graduated painting in the class of Professor Morris Brianchon. He settled in Paris but spent his entire life traveling around the world and gathering impressions for his paintings.

Manev has hundreds of individual exhibitions all over the world and numerous participations in  general exhibitions and biennial performances. Over 3000 of his works are owned by museums, state and private collections in more than 30 countries around the world.

From the very beginning of his career, Manev explores the mystical and the fairytale through his paintings. There are several topics, merging in his work (the strange earth formations of the Bulgarian nature, the desert of Algeria and Tunisia, Mexican motifs), but he returns very often to one of them - the romantic views of the Parisian roofs and chimneys.