The name of the artist Liubov Panchenko became widely known due to the tragic circumstances of the current war. Unfortunately, only after the artist’s death, which occurred as a result of the Russian occupation of Bucha, did Ukraine and the world begin to speak about the unique talent of Liubov Panchenko, who throughout her life created a distinct artistic wonder-world that attracts with its aesthetics and the whimsical nature of its imagery.

Why didn’t the artist gain popularity at the peak of her talent, but only after her death? Liubov Panchenko (1938–2022) was a Sixtiers artist who declared herself and her work as distinctly Ukrainian. Everything Soviet was alien and unnatural to her, and since she “did not want to dance to someone else’s tune,” she refused to join the Union of Soviet Artists. The consequences of such behavior in Soviet society varied: from the inability to purchase materials for creative work in special stores and refusals of solo exhibitions to the silencing of her name and persecution by the KGB. Professionally, Liubov Panchenko managed to realize herself in the field of fashion design. She worked as a designer first at the Design and Engineering Technological Institute, and later at the Republican House of Models. Her works were eagerly published in the magazine “Soviet Woman,” as after the first publications many positive reviews were received. However, this small success did not allow many to learn about other dimensions of her creative nature. Liubov Panchenko was a highly versatile artist; her body of work includes watercolor paintings, linocuts, imaginative decorative paintings, and unique collage works, to which the exhibition at the Sixtiers Museum is dedicated.

The collage panels of Liubov Panchenko testify that the artist found herself in her element. These works are simultaneously graphic due to their fragmentary stylistics, painterly in the richness of colors, and decorative in the creation of a volumetric composition from coat fabrics of various textures. In them, the artist appears as a creator capable of forming a cohesive image of a distinct aesthetic existence from disparate fragments. The panels of Liubov Panchenko resonate with the stylistics of stained glass and mosaics of the 1960s by Alla Horska, Opanas Zalyvakha, and others.

“Her individual and series-based appliqués (collages) are remembered not for their сюжет and literary content, but for what remains imprinted in the viewer’s subconscious and emerges from memory as a sharp sensory image. The overarching aim of these collage compositions, shaped by the artist’s existence and aesthetic preferences, is to materialize her sensations, to express the movements of her own soul for herself and to sincerely share them with others,” – Vasyl Perevalskyi.

The Sixtiers Museum preserves the majority of Liubov Panchenko’s collection.