Milko Bozhkov

Milko Bozhkov (b. 1953, Resen, Bulgaria) is a Bulgarian painter, draughtsman, and color lithographer whose graphic practice has been recognized internationally through more than 100 solo exhibitions and over 150 group exhibitions and biennial participations across Europe and beyond. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia (the former "Nikolay Pavlovich" Higher Institute of Fine Arts), graduating in 1978, and has worked since the early 1980s in painting, book design, and color lithography, with the lithograph as his principal print medium. He was among the thirty contemporary Bulgarian artists included in the 2003 "Contemporary Bulgarian Art Prints in Japan" touring exhibition — organized by Sofia's Lessedra gallery and shown at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and the Tokushima Modern Art Museum.

From his earliest exhibitions Bozhkov was identified with the more avant-garde stream in Bulgarian contemporary art. His subject matter — birds, especially crows and other dark-feathered avians — runs across decades and provides the principal compositional motif of his graphic output, in works such as the lithograph "Two Clouds of Crows" (2000). The repeated bird-cloud motif gives his work a recognizable visual signature that has been read by critics variously as romantic, surreal, and politically inflected — the latter especially in the 1990s post-1989 Bulgarian context.

Bozhkov's honors include the National Award for Painting "Zahari Zograf" (2002) and the annual National Award for Painting "Vladimir Dimitrov – The Master," which he received twice. In 2016 he was awarded the Order of St. Cyril and Methodius, first degree. His works are held in the Library of Congress in Washington, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Ludwig Museum collection in Budapest, and numerous other institutions internationally, including collections in Japan, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic.

His lithographic practice is characterized by atmospheric tonal density and large-format, often diptych or panoramic compositions that extend the bird-cloud motif across a horizontal viewing field approximating the natural width of the seen sky. The painted parallel of this register is more abstract-expressionist, with brushed-and-poured pigment over canvas that retains the flock-of-birds motif at the iconographic level.

Bozhkov's decades-long career exemplifies the Bulgarian post-war model of the painter-printmaker who maintained a sustained graphic output as a parallel — not subordinate — practice to painting. His participation in the 2003 Lessedra-organized touring exhibition places him within the network of Bulgarian printmakers whose graphic work circulated to Japanese audiences in the early 2000s, and his bird-cloud iconography remains one of the more recognizable Bulgarian graphic signatures of the period.