Ivan Nenov (1902 – 1997)
Ivan Nenov is a Bulgarian painter and sculptor. He was born in 1902 in Sofia. He studied at the Academy of Arts under Nikola Ganushev, graduating in 1925 under Nikola Marinov. In 1928 he married his fellow student from the academy, Ekaterina Savova-Nenova. He began his creative path in the field of psychological portraiture. He mainly works in the field of painting, graphics, mosaic, and small sculptures. The preferred techniques for his paintings are tempera and oil paints.
In the 1930s he joined the progressive movement in Bulgarian art, was a member of the Society of New Artists. He painted a series of portraits of women from the people, in which the classical purity of forms and lasting spiritual states are characteristic. In 1932, 1936 and 1938 he resided in Italy, where he experimented with post-cubist painting. Ivan Nenov's work from the 1950s and 1960s is characterized by its realism, color and completeness of composition.
Small plastic art is another area of Nenov's creative pursuits and he presents it at many of the general art exhibitions in applied arts. The artist's preferred materials are ceramics, terracotta, glazed chamotte. He creates a series of small figurative sculptures and ritual vessels, the leading motif of which is again the female image. He turns to small plastic art after he was declared a formalist in the early 1950s and was unable to exhibit his works for a whole decade.
With his sculptures, Ivan Nenov participated in all the more significant events of the Union of Bulgarian Artists in the country and abroad. He was presented in exhibitions in Budapest, Venice, Delhi, Dresden, Zagreb, Milan, Moscow, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Faenza, Frankfurt, Chicago. Despite this, he had only one solo exhibition, in 1975, in Sofia, with several other attempts before that ending in failure. In 1941, he prepared for exhibition nearly 100 works from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, but a bomb fell on his studio and destroyed his works. In 1963, Nenov made another attempt, but his exhibition was thwarted by the authorities.
His works are owned by the National Art Gallery, the Sofia City Art Gallery, galleries in the country, as well as private collections in Greece, Italy, the USA, and Japan. In 1936, for his painting "By the Sea" he was awarded a bronze medal at the Triennial of Applied Arts in Milan and a golden cornflower from the Union of Bulgarian Artists. He was awarded the Order of Cyril and Methodius - II degree in 1960 and I degree in 1963; with the "Red Banner of Labor" in 1963 and the "Georgi Dimitrov" Order in 1982. Winner of awards from the Union of Bulgarian Artists for the overall presentation of ceramics (1968), for his solo exhibition in Sofia in 1975 and the Vladimir Dimitrov-Master painting award in 1977. In 1994 he was elected an academician of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
He died on September 4, 1997. In 1998, the biographical and memorial book by Georgi Kapriev and Petar Zmiycharov "Very Personal. Ivan Nenov" was published. In 2001, Evgeni Klincharov published the book "Conversations with Ivan Nenov / The Artist's Thoughts on Art".
His previously unknown work "Portrait of Lyuba Gabrovska-Dyulgerova" from 2015 is part of the UniArt collection.