Milica Bjelanović – Sublimation

Selection From Oevre

September 29 – October 22, 2025

On Monday, September 29, at 7 PM, exhibition of prints and drawings by Milica Bjelanović, recipient of the Grand Seal Award for 2025, will open at the Graphic Collective Gallery.

Present on our art scene for more than four decades, Bjelanović is an established creative personality whose work has been marked by continuous practice and metamorphoses on both conceptual and visual levels. From figurative scenes of intimate interiors charged with metaphysical tension and sensual female nudes, through associative and abstract drawings, to a series of experimental monotypes “Imprinted Bridges” and pop-art–inspired prints, the artist’s visual language is the result of carefully considered relations among the structural elements of the composition. In recent years, the artist has been exploring the possibilities of visual expression through the reduction of form, to a monochromatic sign that sublimates simplicity and the dominance of creative substance.

She graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, in 1988, class of Professor Živko Đak. The experience of this distinguished art school resonates in her work as an evidence of a personality characterized by keen perception, cultivated sensibility, and perseverance.

An important aspect of the author’s creative process is also the repertoire of themes and motifs that communicate layered poetic-philosophical and spiritual-emotional meanings (time, space, women’s spaces, bridges, direction, boundaries, center, horizon, dialogue, lighthouse, luminosities…). Thus, in the series “Under the Glow of the Stars”, the artist reexamines the position of a woman through the prism of family and social norms. The imprints of cracks of the bridges of Zrenjanin, evoke associations with destruction, deterioration, and transience, while the network of black lines through which light breaks through in her drawings reveals a “clear intention to find a way out, through confronting oneself,” as noted by theorists.

The orthography of her artistic language has evolved, as has its discursive foundation. The titles of the series presented at the retrospective exhibition in Zrenjanin, in the winter of 2023 – “Harmonious Ambience”, “World of Intimacy”, “Intimate Infinity of Interiors”, “The Mystery of Intimacy”, “Over the Riverbank”, “Imprinted Bridges”, “Drawing Luminosities”… (Slavica Žarković) – serve as guides through the oeuvre and its spiritual, emotional, and intellectual transformations;they also reflect the overcoming of obstacles as necessary factors in humanity’s ongoing search of meaning. Today, in a mature creative phase, she sharpens the focus of her conceptual approach by reducing information to the essential, close to the idea – the less is more.

Milica Bjelanović has been a member of SULUV since 1989. She has exhibited in about 25 solo exhibitions and more than 150 group exhibitions in country and abroad; a recipient of numerous awards, her works are held in collections worldwide. She lives and works in Zrenjanin.