Dr. Monika Vykoukal
Generali Foundation, Vienna

An oil painting of the Stephandoms, a view of the Karlskirche, nudes, sceneries. The enumeration awakes an delusive impression of a concern for a subjects matter of an artist from the 19th century. The painting of Milan Markovich nevertheless, turns out as a thought-out, concentrated discourse with the tradition in painting.

Going from a formally strict education, trained in the sculptural, shematic and constructing proportional rules of the nineteenth century, the construction becommes the essential scaffolding of an discourse with the dialectic of structure and gesture. Construction lines pull through the light painting, come to the foreground,oscillate, then free themselves in the abstract. Sculptural forms in the contrast to a monochrome, uniformly two-dimensional bacround.

Emphasised points of light become independent to expand, to attain spatial magnitude. A contrasted play of plasticity and transparency, fragmentary and permeable, but also of solid space-conquering forms. The stereotype as an occasion for an always present, concentrated, questioning discourse with perception and representation. Seeing, explaining – always as a sensation, as an expression of an internal world by external objects, fragment-like, joined together, then reconstructed and examined. This opening of forms as an emotion, liberating, struggle around expression by work ing with timeless rules of this game, is positioned as a sollid starting point, but also as a tension-space for a liberating solution. These fractures bring a fragility into the images, a liberation, which at the same time creates an uncertainty, mids in a space of classical securities of the methodology and the motives. The specific and the unique , the „Künstlichkeit“ (artifice) of the representation, as well as the struggle of seeing and manifesting, become so clearly.

Figures, buildings, sceneries, become in a simoultanius process formed and broken. Transparent and fragile, subtle... with selective distortions in movement. The formal here is always consciously a method, means to the discourse, with tensions, most of all, from nature to artifice. The silent, superficial classical harmony, becomes consciously delusive.

 

Dr. Wilfried Seipel
Former general director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Introduction for the catalogue of the exhibition in Palais Harrach

Due to his explicit concentration on his own creative work, Milan Markovich is one of the artists who have become increasingly present in the Austrian and international art scene. No longer a marginal figure in the scene that is undergoing an increasingly meteoric development at present, he is ranking among the indispensable stock and even the substance of artistic production in Austria’s art scene today. Partly free from contemporary works and developments Markovich is holding a special position in painting today. He seems to feel bound to painting in a style characterized by depth and plasticity especially in representing the sculpture, plasticity and anatomy of the human body in its three-dimensional structure.

Born in Vojevodina, the artist grew up in Vienna and completed a one-year education at the university of Applied Art under professor Oberhuber. He continued his studies at the traditional New York Art Students League where, under the guidance of Robert Beverly Hale, a previous curator of the Metropolitan Museum, he discovered and refined his special talent and predilection for representing three-dimensional structures at the two-dimensional level.

The human body and its deformations, seen from different perspectives, seem to be a center of interest in his work, which in their pastose surface sometimes seem to be suggestive of Francis Bacon. His condensed reproduction of torso-like human bodies, often in dynamic motion, is characterized by the contrast between rest and motion, spiritualization and insistent plasticity.

Sometimes Milan Markovich’s paintings give the impression of being created by an artist who is a sculptor at the bottom of his heart, attempting to turn the three-dimensional language of sculpture into a two-dimensional level characterized by spatial depth, dynamic development and plasticity. A sculptor who achieves his effect at the two-dimensional level but create his own spatial reality in his language of forms. He is an artist whose development potential leaves much open, and for whose future works we are waiting with keen interest.

Milan Markovich
Milan Markovich
Samariter
Der guter Samariter, oil on canvas, 180x160 cm
KHM
Stephansdom
Stephansdom, oil on canvas, 180x160 cm