“Fame is an empty thing. Either you have created something, or you disappear. You may be forgotten for two centuries and then rediscovered.”
Lyubomir Yanev, 2001
There are artists whose place in history seems secure even during their lifetime. And there are others whose works gradually disappear from view, only to re-emerge years later – sometimes appearing more unexpected and more contemporary than our memory of them might suggest.
Lyubomir Yanev (1951–2004) belongs to the latter.
Between the Visible and the Forgotten is an encounter with an artist who was an active presence on the art scene during the 1970s and 1980s, participating in exhibitions, international print biennials and presentations of Bulgarian art across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. He received awards for printmaking, drawing and illustration, and his works entered museum and private collections in Bulgaria and abroad.
Then, gradually, he moved away from the centre of artistic life.
From 1986 onwards, Yanev lived and worked in the village of Staro Stefanovo, near Lovech. The distance was not merely geographical. During the last two decades of his life, his work gradually slipped beyond the active attention of audiences and researchers. After his death in 2004, this distance acquired another dimension – time.
Yet forgetting in art is rarely final.
Even during his lifetime, Yanev seemed to acknowledge this possibility. His words from 2001 – that an artist may be forgotten and then rediscovered much later – sound almost prophetic today. They raise a question that reaches beyond his own biography: how does an artist remain visible, and how does an artist disappear from cultural memory?
The answer inevitably brings us back to the works themselves.
Lyubomir Yanev graduated in Illustration from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia in 1975. Drawing remained at the core of his artistic language, yet it never confined him. Printmaking, illustration, drawing and experiments with three-dimensional form coexist as different possibilities within the same visual thinking.
At its foundation lies an exceptional command of drawing – precise, sensitive to detail and, at the same time, capable of moving beyond directly observed reality. In Yanev’s work, the visible world rarely remains simply what it appears to be. Reality and imagination permeate one another; the human figure, the object and space may shift towards dream, grotesque or allegory.
It is precisely this freedom that makes the artist difficult to place within a single category.
His training as an illustrator implies a relationship with text and narrative, yet his works often move beyond specific storytelling. Printmaking, too, ceases to be merely an image impressed upon paper. Yanev experiments with its material qualities, takes it into space, creates objects and searches for new relationships between image, matter and symbol.
In critical and journalistic texts, he has often been described as “unpredictable.” The word seems appropriate precisely because his work resists definitive boundaries. Behind the virtuoso draughtsman stands an artist who continually changes direction – moving between observation and imagination, between illustration and autonomous artwork, between the printed sheet and three-dimensional space.
Today, this freedom allows his works to be seen beyond the period in which they were created.
More than two decades after Lyubomir Yanev’s death, the exhibition at Ruse Art Gallery does not attempt to construct a definitive portrait of the artist. It is not a retrospective, nor does it seek to arrange his entire body of work into a completed historical narrative.
It offers something simpler – a new encounter.
With drawing. With imagination. With a world suspended between reality and fantasy, a world that continues to resist unambiguous definition.
And with the question of what happens to an artwork when its artist is no longer here. Who preserves it? Who shows it? Who brings it back into public view? And when does the forgotten become visible again?
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to Boris Yanev, the artist’s son, who has provided part of his father’s artistic legacy for presentation to the public in Ruse. In this way, personal memory leaves the private space of the family and becomes shared once again.
Perhaps this is one of the ways in which art resists oblivion.
Not through fame, which Lyubomir Yanev himself called “an empty thing,” but through the works that remain.
And through the moment when someone stands before them once again – and sees them.
