Paintings by Lika Yanko (1928-2001), one of the most original Bulgarian artists, have been stolen from a private home in Sofia. This was reported to “Sega” by the gallerist Lavren Petrov, who presented works by Lika Yanko in his “Contrast” gallery, and in 2019 also published a book dedicated to her, with a text by Krasimir Iliev. Petrov was informed about the robbery by the owners, who are the heirs of the artist.
There are five missing paintings by Lika Yanko — they were taken off their subframes and only the canvases were stolen, plus one more painted on wood. The two largest are 50/90 cm in size. They have never been graded or exhibited, at least not in the last 20 years, the heirs told Sega. Two of them are cataloged and the others can be seen in family photos. We are posting the photos in the hope that this will help identify them and make it more difficult for thieves to find a buyer.
At the beginning of 2019, 15 works of great Bulgarian artists, 9 of them – by Vladimir Dimitrov-Maistora, were stolen from a house in Sofia, home of his heirs. The media published photos of the missing paintings and the police found them within days. They had been bought by an antiquarian in the capital, tempted by the significantly lower price at which the thieves were offering them.
The heirs of Lika Yanko have also established the absence of four more works from their collection – 3 canvases by Zhivka Peycheva (1897-1980), a student of Mrkvichka, and one by the artist Gancho Karabadjakov (1951-2021) from Turnovo, author of domestic scenes with Balkan stories with a distinctive style. The paintings went missing between February 1 and 4, at which time the home was under renovation and their owners were not living there.
In 2019, the “Kvadrat 500” exhibition center presented an exhibition with about 100 undisplayed drawings by Lika Yanko from the 1970s, placed by the curator Ivo Milev in a digital environment. “Lika Yanko is an artist who, even during his lifetime, became a symbol of the free artist in the stagnant time of socialism… a victim of a dynamic and changing time,” Milev shared then. He also told that Yanko was among the best-selling authors of the only commercial organization that exported Bulgarian art abroad at the time, Hemus.
Lika Janko, born Evangelija Grabova on March 19, 1928, was the daughter of Albanian immigrants. She studied at the French College in Sofia, where she was first introduced to the work of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, who later influenced her work. In 1946, he entered the Art Academy majoring in painting in the classes of Prof. Dechko Uzunov and Prof. Iliya Petrov, but never graduated.
Her first solo exhibition was in 1967 in Sofia, but it was panned by critics and prematurely closed. Lika Yanko continued to paint, but did not exhibit her canvases until 1981, when she received an invitation to an exhibition personally from Lyudmila Zhivkova. In the mid-1970s, her paintings began to be bought by foreign embassies and received high praise from European gallerists.
For his entire life, Yanko held only 7 exhibitions, dying of pneumonia a few days after the opening of the last one, in the Varna “Cavalet” gallery. During his lifetime, he donated 82 canvases to the Sofia City Gallery. There were actually 80 paintings donated, but two of them in 2004 were understood to be two-sided.
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