Mihael Milunović

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Mihael Milunović (born 1967) is a Serbian, French and Croatian, painter working in many different mediums, using them and interconnecting them, such as painting, photography, sculpture, installation, sound, video and objects. His main interests focus on social and political issues, as well as on the phenomenon of contextualization of the common object. His main pictorial works deals with geography and mapping.

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1 EMBLEMS AGAINST UNIVERSAL TRUTHS
2 Education
3 Selected solo exhibitions
4 Selected group exhibitions
5 External links

[edit] EMBLEMS AGAINST UNIVERSAL TRUTHS

For many centuries, though the real beginnings lie even further back in the past, the visual repertoire of signs has been determined by emblems and flags. On this level, a situation emerged in which design mode and design function merged into an indivisible entity, where old, established rules proscribed a systematically rigid framework. It was from this structure that related and commissioned forms of art began to develop. Putting aside for a moment the need to supply new or re-independent states with official insignia for their new-found national sovereignty, their 20th and 21st century successors are probably best seen in the creation of logos. Their presence in the public domain and private awareness appears evident: they clearly seem to dominate the aesthetics of our everyday life. Irrespective of whether it’s a matter of the public or private sectors, of pressure groups or non-profit making organisations, the new picture & text emblems are, in any case, required to cement a notion of identity and be instantly recognisable. Former designers of arts and crafts were subject to strict conventions of design. It now seems they have long been replaced by the art directors of the advertising and marketing agency world, whose designs are tested in consumer opinion surveys, sometimes rejected, then re-developed and eventually implemented. So the old conventions have long disappeared, the age-old tradition of formal accuracy has been replaced by the whims of the most relevant age groups.

In his new digital drawings, Belgrade artist Mihael Milunovic appears to have bypassed modern-day logo culture and gone back to the roots of emblematic heraldry. The clues are already there, both on the formal level and in terms of his choice of subject matter. The creation of an emotional awareness and need to focus on concrete subject-matter goes hand in hand with this evident return to proven aesthetic patterns: at the heart of the recently re-developed semiotic systems there is an admittedly selective, yet ultimately defining statement being made about the projection of global political systems, the latent presence or actual depiction of the willingness of certain political ideologies to use force against cultural or political communities, of collective or individual strategies. Just as with the old classic precepts, the transformations published here, in their unusual political commitment, reveal the artist’s determination to concentrate on clear, minimalist visual solutions. Using this method, we begin to discern, in quite general terms, a distinct modus he uses in his forms of expression, one that enables us to interpret our experience of reality with greater clarity, one above and beyond the specific approach he brings to his work. Milunovic certainly uses great variety in his approach to symbols: for his starting point, he takes more or less well known configurations – in paradigmatic fashion, such as the famous death’s head (skull) emblem – or develops completely new abbreviations for images. In semantic terms, they work particularly well in series, and in terms of the latent reference they make to conventional schemes. Above all, the forms we see are militaristic emblems, deliberate statements on the current geography of the political world, and compressed: in their reflection of the logo culture, they systematically hint at ‘other messages’. It is against the background of these everyday visual signs, together with their media-oriented conditions of production and degrees of impact that the present Patches assume their particular significance. In general, they fall into line with a frequently expressed attitude in contemporary art: to seize upon contemporary visual systems and analyse their one-dimensional (overwhelmingly semiotic) approach through a number of different transfers, with the aim of producing a wider understanding or more critical reception of such images. When Milunovic conveys his clearly defined political concerns, including his doubts that a pre-manufactured universal truth even exists, along a third way between emblems and logos, he is using a form that has already been used – in past and present public visual abbreviations – to refer ultimately to the information society, in which politics is transported primarily through the media and their various forms of representation.

Werner FENZ

[edit] Education

1987 - 1995 Academy of Fine Arts University of Belgrade ( BA and MA in Fine Arts).
1995 - 1996 Specialization Studies at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts (ENSBA), Paris, France, class of professor Vladimir Velickovic.

[edit] Selected solo exhibitions

2006

"Memory", Gallery Langhans, Prague, Czech Republic

2005

"New Stuff", Gallery Hilger, Vienna, Austria

2004

"Under Che", Art Space O3ONE, Belgrade, Serbia
"Arme Sacree", Galerie la Serre, Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts et du Design, St. Etienne, France

2003

"Notebooks", Centre Culturel Francais, Belgrade, Serbie
"Sample", Gallery Zvono, Belgrade, Serbie
"Balkan Matrix", with Stevan Vukovic, Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester, UK

2002

"Campaign", Centre Culturel Yougoslave, Paris, France

1998

"Sale", Gallery 12+, Belgrade, Serbia
"Shaman and Reliquaires", Cultural Centre of Nis, Nis, Serbia
"Geopeinture 2", Gallery Nikki Diane Marquardt, Paris, France

1996

"Carte", Galerie Bernanos, Paris, France

1995

"Reduction of Dimensions", Gallery 12+, Belgrade, Serbia

[edit] Selected group exhibitions

2006

"Bang-Bang! 2", Musee International d'Art Modeste (MIAM), Sete, France
"Bang-Bang! 1", Musee d'Art et de l'Industrie, St. Etienne, France
"Giardino, luoghi della piccola Realta", Pallazzo Delle Arti, Naples, Italy
"47th October Salon", Belgrade, Serbia
"Seven Perspectives on Desire", Espace Sol, Seoul, South Korea

2005

"Domicile", Musee d'Art Moderne, St. Etienne, France
"The Giving Person", Pallazzo Delle Arti, Naples, Italy

2004

"Belgrade Art Inc.", Seccesion Haus, Vienna, Austria
"Mois de la Photographie", Vienna, Austria
"Passage d'Europe", Musee d'Art Moderne, St. Etienne,France

2003

"Urban Fog of Belgrade", Bikini Haus, Berlin,Germany
"In Gorges of Balkans", Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany
"II Biennale de Valencia", Valencia, Spain
"Real Utopia", Rotor and Graz - European Capital of Culture, Graz, Austria
"Pancevo Biennial", Pancevo, Serbia

2001

"Conversations", Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia
"Young Dialogues", Espace Hilger, Paris, France
"FIAC", Paris, France
"Die Sammlung", MUMOK, Museum Ludwig, Vienna, Austria
"Temoins Oculaires", Caue 92, Sceaux, France
"Young Dialogues", Espace Hilger, Paris, France

2000

"L'Autre Moitie d'Europe", Galerie de Jeu de Paume, Paris, France