Milko Bozhkov

Milko Bozhkov (b. 1953, Resen, Bulgaria) is a Bulgarian painter, draughtsman, and color lithographer whose graphic practice has been recognized internationally through over 100 solo exhibitions and 150-plus biennial participations across Europe, Russia, and Asia. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia, and has worked since the early 1980s in painting, book design, and color lithography, with the lithograph as his principal print medium. His prints circulate widely through the Lessedra biennial system, and he is one of four senior Bulgarian printmakers (alongside Skorchev, Maystorov, and Ninov) included in the 2003 'Contemporary Bulgarian Art Prints in Japan' touring exhibition at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum.

From his earliest exhibitions Bozhkov was identified with the most 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. The 2003 Japan touring exhibition presented two of his lithographs from this series: 'Two Clouds of Crows' (2000, lithograph 45 × 56 cm) and the diptych '51 Birds Flying Over' (1995/96, lithograph 66 × 100 cm). The repeated bird-cloud motif provides his work with 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 awards include the National Award for Painting Zahari Zograph (2002), the Varna Grand Prix in Fine Arts (1995), and multiple first prizes at the International Print Biennial in Zrenjanin, Serbia. He won the National Prize for Painting 'Vladimir Dimitrov - The Master' twice. In May 2016 he was awarded the most prestigious Bulgarian state honour, the medal 'St. 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 (Hungary), and numerous other museums internationally.

His lithograph practice is characterized by atmospheric tonal density and large-format diptych or panoramic compositions. The diptych format used in '51 Birds Flying Over' (66 × 100 cm in two adjoining panels) is a recurring structural choice in his prints — it allows him to extend the bird-cloud motif across a horizontal viewing field that approximates 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.

Within the contemporary Bulgarian-Japanese print exchange context, Bozhkov represents the surreal-figurative strand alongside Skorchev's mythological figuration, Maystorov's existential figuration, and Ninov's geometric-architectural abstraction. His Lessedra biennial participation — alongside the Lessedra-organized Japan touring shows — has been the principal channel through which his graphic output has circulated to Japanese collectors and curators since the early 2000s. He is represented internationally through Artsy, ArtFacts, ArtWizard, and Artpapillon, and his lithograph editions are issued in small runs (typical edition 30-50).