Milena Jovicevic Popovic

In Unti­tled 2007, Mon­tene­grin artist, Milena Jovice­vic Popovic, evokes a dreamy nos­tal­gia of child­hood. She recon­fig­ures snip­pets of mem­ory, com­bin­ing Neo-Expressionist style with bouts of ten­ta­tive fig­u­ra­tion. In a sea of vibrant blue, we see the rough out­line of a swim­ming dog, the burn­ing orb of a dis­tant sun, the abstract and the fan­tas­ti­cal ren­di­tion of a lakeshore, replete with flow­ers com­posed of spindly ten­drils and blos­soms of heavy impasto. She obstructs this vision with patches of white, cre­at­ing a hazi­ness that implies the fal­li­bil­ity of mem­ory. In an effort to blend rec­ol­lec­tion with real­ity, Popovic leaves us with the rem­nants of a pho­to­graphic neg­a­tive, inject­ing her work with wist­ful­ness for a time long past.
With this par­tic­u­lar piece, Popovic takes a dif­fer­ent route from her usual fig­u­ra­tive, Pop-Art style, which uti­lizes the appro­pri­a­tion of sym­bols to cre­ate enig­matic puz­zles for the viewer to deci­pher. There is an under­ly­ing humor present in her work, which does not belie a more fore­bod­ing, macabre cur­rent that weaves itself through her can­vases.
Milena Jovice­vic Popovic was born in Cetinje, Mon­tene­gro in 1976. She com­pleted her post­grad­u­ate stud­ies at The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has exhib­ited inter­na­tion­ally in France, Italy, Spain and New York.
Per­sis Singh is a New York-based writer. Milena Jovice­vic Popovic is a Mon­tene­gro –based artist.