Nationality American Website lukova.net | Known for Visual Art | |
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Books Social Justice 2008, 12 Posters by Luba Lukova, Graphic Guts: Political Posters by Luba Lukova | ||
Luba Lukova (Bulgarian: Люба Лукова) is an American visual artist and designer, known for her thought-provoking images and expressive poster designs. Her work has won international acclaim, and is represented in the permanent collections of the MoMA, Denver Art Museum, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
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Biography
Lukova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Bulgaria's capital Sofia. Аfter her graduation in 1986 she was forced by then-Communist regime to leave Sofia and resettle in the town of Blagoevgrad. She moved to the United States in 1991, after traveling to participate in the Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibition; shortly thereafter, she was hired by the New York Times Book Review and established her studio in New York City. Lukova's work is exhibited around the world and has won many awards including: Grand Prix Savignac at the International Poster Salon in Paris, ICOGRADA Excellence Award, and Reisman Foundation Award. She holds an honorary doctoral degree from the Art Institute of Boston.
Work
Lukova is known for using bold contrasts, visual metaphors, and highly focused concepts to create images that take "only seconds to grasp meaning." Stylistically, her work has been compared to that of German Expressionists, Escher, and Picasso, and she cites inspiration from Goya, Rembrandt, Käthe Kollwitz, folk art, and Chekov. Her art incorporates vivid colors, simplified figures and hand-rendered typography, and frequently comments on social issues including income inequality, censorship, corruption, and environmental conditions. "Her seemingly simple, two- or three-color images carry the emotive power of expressionist wood engravings [...] Lukova's vocabulary is the human body, stretched, deformed, twisted gracefully and grotesquely."
Lukova discusses the use of figures in her work in contrast to more conceptual visual art, stating, "How can we produce such things when half the people on earth are starving and there are wars and disease? I think people feel my work is strong because I want to use the human figure to talk about the human condition." These themes are prominent in her "Social Justice 2008" series of posters, as well as works for Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian organizations, universities, Broadway productions, non-profit organizations, Shakespeare plays, choreographers, and the War Resisters League.
Solo exhibitions
