Liubov Panchenko

Liubov Mykhailivna Panchenko was born on 2 February 1938 in the settlement of Bucha in Kyiv Oblast. She completed the embroidery department of the Kyiv School of Applied Arts in the late 1950s, worked in a tailoring workshop, took up linocut, and in 1968 enrolled in the evening graphics course at the Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute. She was employed as an artist-designer at the Project-Design Technology Institute and at the Republican House of Models, and in these years produced watercolour series, clothing models, embroidery patterns, book vignettes and paintings; her embroidery designs were published in the magazine "Radianska Zhinka" and copied across the republic. In the 1960s she attended the Club of Creative Youth "Suchasnyk" and joined its literary section "Brama". She painted pysanky, embroidered national costumes for choirs, collected money for political prisoners serving sentences for "anti-Soviet agitation", and helped revive Christmas carolling and the vertep in Kyiv; in 1964 she made designs for Ukrainian ceremonial linens and decorated walls of the Taras Shevchenko Museum while her colleagues Horska, Semykina, Sevruk and Zalyvakha were making the stained glass «Шевченко. Мати». Despite her professional mastery she was kept outside the Union of Artists and the authorities neither exhibited nor published her; her first substantial showing was a jubilee exhibition of more than 150 works at the National Museum of Ukrainian Literature in 2008, followed by «Світе мій!» at the Hrushevskyi Museum in 2014. She lived in Lisova Bucha and remained there through the Russian occupation of the town in March 2022. According to Bucha's mayor Anatolii Fedoruk she died in hospital on 30 April 2022, in her eighty-fifth year, after a month of starvation in the occupied town; she was buried on 2 May in Bucha's Yablunske cemetery beside her husband, the artist Oleksii Oliinyk. A street in Bucha was renamed for her in 2023 and the National Bank of Ukraine issued a 10-hryvnia commemorative coin in her honour in April 2025. Her works are in private collections and in the Museum of the Sixtiers in Kyiv, and her first retrospective, «Всесвіт Любові», opened at the Museum of the History of Kyiv in February 2025.