Misha Milovanovich

Biography

Misha Milovanovich is a Belgrade-born artist living and working in London.

Misha works across several mediums, from sculpture to painting and live art. Characterised by vivid colour, optical movement and energetic visual cadences, Misha's visual work fuses a diverse repertoire of images and forms. She often features discarded shards of consumerism - unloved icons of disposability and careless consumption.

Misha's work is often a symphonic abstraction. Her colourful, densely layered works are held in a state of tension between order and chaos, rational structure and spontaneity. She combines depth and surface relief, orchestrating bold contrasts of form, texture and space in her pictures. An intimate colour palette of bodily fluids - red, pink, white, black, yellow and brown - animate the writhing forms and the refracted memories of cartoonish cultural production.

A cultural polymath, Misha is constantly engaged in observing society and it’s distortions of desire, lust and attitudes to the body. Traditional techniques have been studied and absorbed and although her work is partly conceptual, it's execution always reflects these hard won technical abilities. Misha's main subject matter is emotion, so naturally her work is highly personal and biographical in ways that create a direct, emotional response from the viewer. Empathy and the universals of human experience - passion, nostalgia, desire and disgust are inescapable in her work.

Misha is herself a ‘displaced’ person, having left Serbia for London in her late teens she still carries within her a ‘stranger’s perspective’ and perceives the world as an outsider, someone ever alert to the non-verbal subtleties of communication.

Misha's artistic progenitors include her mentor Martin Kippenberger, Wassily Kandinsky and Phillip Guston as well as contemporary artists Gilbert and George, Keith Tyson, Robert Pruitt and Jim Lambie.

Misha Milovanovich's sculptural works blends motifs from a variety of sources including Dada, Surrealism, Bossa Nova to primitive arts and post-feminist dialogue. Milovanovich’s artwork is always spirited, humorous and filled with joy. Her playful totemic sculptures reflect a kind of prism which defines a new form of appropriation and reference-making.

Characterised by a profusion of exuberant colors and shapes, energetic visual cadences, Misha blurs boundaries—between abstraction and figuration, painting and sculpture, flatness and dimensionality, formalism and conceptualism—demonstrating the richness of the middle ground between opposites. In her most recent work, Misha Milovanovich’s unique aesthetics absorbs network of influences with centres around primitive and mythology. These are anthropomorphic creations that exude warmth and humour and perform (nod/homagge) to Miro, Picasso, David Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Noguchi. Her work blends animal shapes and shapes of nature always giving it human quality, that of primeval man that still resides in cerebellum part of our brain and is lost in the age of post-truth world that finds its self digitally displaced. Her work relates to human condition and our connection with natural world and our selves, yet offers optimism in the face of contemporary absurdity. Everything connects to her biography - lived experiences, learned techniques, jokes, memories and eulogies.

Works