From: Ukrainian Museum 🇺🇦 Last fall the Ukrainian Museum acquired a portfolio of 17 works on paper by the Ukrainianartist and fashion designer Liubov Panchenko (1938–2022). She was a part of the “shistdesiatnyky” movement (the 1960s generation) of artists, writers, and intellectuals whose output brought a cultural revival to Soviet Ukraine.

Mostly watercolors and gouache, the works are only initialed or not signed at all, and for a long time the donor did not know who authored them. It was only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which precipitated the artist’s tragic death, that the story of Panchenko became widely known. She was born in Bucha, the town in Kyiv Oblast whose name has become synonymous with Russian war crimes, and lived there most of her life. During the short-lived Russian occupation of the area, the artist was home alone for about one month with no food. She died in a Kyiv hospital on 30 April, 2022.

Throughout her life, Panchenko defended the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture, and she never exhibited during the Soviet era. Her first solo exhibition took place in Kyiv in 1992. She was awarded the Vasyl Stus Prize in 2001.

🎨: Liubov Panchenko, “Untitled”, n.d., watercolor and pencil on paper, gift of Natalia Sonevytsky

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