Coloured Threads in Door Knobs is the first exhibition in a UK public gallery by the artist Milena Dragicevic. Bringing together work dating back to 2000 and a series of new paintings, this exhibition presents the first opportunity to see the transition in Dragicevic’s practice.
Dragicevic’s work explores problems dealing with the relationship of space, sculpture and their translation into painting. Her approach to painting - the placing of the image, layering of colour and the self-imposed parameters within which she works - allows her to produce paintings which are simple in composition yet psychologically complex.
Referencing a personal culture and heritage, the title Coloured Threads in Door Knobs relates to a specific Eastern European superstition. Her earlier paintings appropriate and reframe images from a variety of sources, including modernist architecture, iconic images, ancient history and her own photographs.
Her more recent paintings, titled Supplicants, is a series of smaller scale paintings of friends’ and acquaintances’ faces that have been altered by a variety of interventions. Titles are important to Dragicveic. Seemingly titled indiscriminately, Supplicants 88 exists while Supplicants 25 is yet to be painted, this technique allows each painting to been seen as an individual work within a continuing series.
In contrast to Supplicants, the Tuksiarvik (prayer place) series taken from the Inuit language depicts twisting, totemic objects that capture the works of modern sculptors such as Brancusi and Shapiro, while Dragicevic’s Alliraujaq (table) series extends the spacial world of sculpture and the flattened, illusionist space of painting.
Milena Dragicevic was born in Serbia in 1965 and raised in Canada. She now lives and works in London. She completed her BA in Fine Art in Toronto in 1988 and her MA in Painting at the RCA, London in 1992. Recent solo exhibitions include Of Ants, Galerie Martin Janda, Austria, 2008 and The Supplicants, Galeria Vera Munro, Germany, 2006. She has also exhibited at IBID-Projects, London; De Hallen, Netherlands; and ICA, London.
Kindly supported by The Elephant Trust.
