site.btaExhibition Introduces Unconventional Perspective on Artist Lika Yanko

“Journey to the Image” offers a somewhat unconventional perspective on the creative path of Lika Yanko, National Gallery Director Anelia Nikolaeva said at the opening of the exhibition on Wednesday evening at The Palace, a branch of the National Gallery.

“We are opening an exhibition of one of the most interesting women artists. After her death, the National Gallery, together with the Sofia City Art Gallery, received 130 of her works as part of Lika Yanko’s bequest,” Nikolaeva said.

She said that the main focus of the exhibition is on Lika Yanko’s early period, not only on her early experiments, which differ from the Lika we know for her schematic collages, but also because the narrative developed by the exhibition’s curators, Nikolay Ushtavaliiski and Iva Veleva, includes the idea of Yanko’s travels over the years in the Rhodope Mountains together with fellow women artists. In this sense, the exhibition presents a somewhat unusual perspective on the artist’s creative journey, Nikolaeva explained.

“It may sound cliche, but we are used to viewing an author’s life and creative path as a kind of journey. The second narrative line is more interesting, namely the purely physical journey - the movement through space among images and settings offered by the reality of socialist Bulgaria during that period. We are talking about the late 1950s and the early 1960s. In a sketch-like manner, much like the exhibition itself, I want to outline the era, its psychological atmosphere, and what was happening during that time. By the late 1950s, the positions of so-called socialist realism had already begun to weaken,” said one of the exhibition’s curators, Nikolay Ushtavaliiski.

He said that during the 1960s, the state began financing the creation of art. The official creative unions, not only the Union of Bulgarian Artists, but the other creative unions as well, were distributing generous travel grants and even more generous commissions to their members. As a result, artists, writers, poets, and playwrights began travelling to agricultural cooperatives, factories, and major national construction sites in order to depict labor and working life.

At the same time, a small group of women artists, a close circle of friends, all of them from Sofia, were also travelling in a similar way, but for somewhat different reasons, the curator explained.

This group of women artists, among whom was Lika Yanko, abandon the comfort of their studios and begin annual creative journeys - informal plein air sessions across settlements in the Rhodope Mountains, the surroundings of Melnik, the picturesque areas around Karlanovo, and Sozopol. These plein air gatherings continued for nearly ten years, from 1960 to the end of the decade. “This is precisely the task we have set for ourselves in a sketch-like approach: to place Lika Yanko within a broader context,” Ushtavaliiski explained.

The exhibition places Yanko’s works within a wider framework - both of Bulgarian art from the period and of this informal artistic circle. Some of the works on display are being presented to the public for the first time, he added.

According to him, the exhibition aims to expand the understanding of Lika Yanko’s work and to draw attention to less explored areas in the history of Bulgarian art from the second half of the 20th century.

The other curator of the exhibition, Iva Veleva, thanked the team and partners for the realization of the project.

The National Gallery holds one of the most representative collections of works by the artist Lika Yanko (1928–2001), enriched thanks to a donation she made during her lifetime. Following major exhibitions in 2002 and 2011, the current project focuses attention on the early period of her artistic output.