Exhibition opening ‘Milorad Bata Mihailović: On the Occasion of the Birth of an Academician Rebel’

The exhibition titled ‘Milorad Bata Mihailović: On the Occasion of the Birth of an Academician Rebel’, authored by Ješa Denegri  and Marija S. Đorđević, was opened at the SASA Gallery, on Tuesday, 30 May, at 7 p.m. The exhibition, organized by the SASA Gallery in cooperation with the RIMA Gallery, aims to restore the importance of Mihailović’s painting work and points to new possibilities of its re-evaluation. With its thematic approach based on painstakingly chosen representative paintings, the exhibition offers a distinctive overview of our artist’s works, along with an opportunity to see some works for the first time. The exposition includes works from the artist’s family legacy, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, and private collections.

The opening segment of the exhibition concentrates on Milorad Bata Mihailović’s zenith in painting, consisting of abstract landscapes, grand-scale paintings created in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. Through the analysis of the term abstract landscape, taken over from French art critique, this thematic segment focuses on the relation between abstract form and referential substance meaning within Mihailović’s paintings. The second part puts topographic locations such as Belgrade, Paris and New York in the focus as important life and art epicentres, to which the artist has dedicated a series of paintings. Finally, the third segment of the exhibition deals with chronologically the earliest period of his work presented through portraits, i.e. aspects of Belgrade periods which inquire about the presence of figures and their off-and-on disappearance in the painter’s opus.

Since his beginnings, a Zadar rebel, followed by a Paris-experienced painter and an external member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Milorad Bata Mihailović has marked an important period in Serbian modern art. His works can be found in major museums in Serbia and abroad, and various private collections.

The exhibition is open to the public until 13 August.