site.btaAugust 6, 1915: Birthday of Renowned Bulgarian Graphic Artist Stefan Kanchev

Stefan Kirov Kanchev (1915-2001) was a Bulgarian graphic artist best known for his logo design work. Kanchev is the author of around 1,600 logos, including those of the National Palace of Culture, National Art Gallery, National Opera and Ballet, Bulgarian National Television, Union of Bulgarian Artists, TZUM, International Fair Plovdiv, and Petrol AD. He is often referred to as the "father of Bulgarian graphic design" and the "master of the trademark", the National Academy of Art writes on its website.

Kanchev was born on August 6, 1915, in Kalofer, a town nestled in a valley below the Balkan Mountains in Central Bulgaria (then the Kingdom of Bulgaria). The son of an icon painter, he enrolled at the National Academy of Art in the capital when he was 25, where he studied mural painting in 1940–1945 in the class of Prof. Dechko Uzunov.

Kanchev took part in exhibitions and biennales in Bulgaria and abroad over the next 22 years, including Belgrade, Budapest, Berlin, Moscow, Warsaw, Brno, Ljubljana and New York City. During this time, individual exhibitions of his work were organized in Sofia, Moscow, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest, among other cities.

In 1967, Kanchev participated in an American Institute of Graphic Arts international exhibition in which he presented 23 of his logos. Fifteen years later, in 1982, Japanese magazine Idea ran a 16-page feature on Kanchev and his work. In 1994 he was named among the world's top ten trademark artists.  The title was awarded by the International Trademark Centre in Ostend, Belgium.

Kanchev worked in all areas of applied arts. He was an author of numerous covers of books with folklore fairy tales, posters, trademarks, postcards, greetings cards, print advertisements, forms and envelopes, post stamps, product labels and packaging. As a designer, Kanchev was often inspired by traditional Bulgarian art and folklore. His works are imaginative, with calm and clear composition, felicitous relation between fonts and shapes, clear forms and creative ideas.

According to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Encyclopaedia of Fine Arts in Bulgaria, Kanchev's work "was distinguished by rich imagination, clear composition, clean shapes, original artistic ideas that entirely fulfil the content of the work". In the words of artist and critic Ivan Nenov, in the August 1961 issue of Art magazine, quoted by the stefankanchev.com website, Kanchev's “trademarks are entirely new, modern without being merely fashionable. Each of these trademarks can be magnified to a monumental size or reduced to a miniature, and it will not lose neither its readability nor its graceful beauty."

For his work, Kanchev received state decorations, including the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius 1st class in 1956, 1963 and 1969, the Order of Red Banner of Labour in 1965, and the Order of People's Republic of Bulgaria 2nd class in 1975.