Milenko Prvacki | Staircases

Courtesy of the artist 

Born in 1951 in the former Yugoslavia, Milenko Prvački graduated with a Master’ of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, Romania. He was the Dean at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts for 17 years and currently holds the position of Senior Fellow at the institution. Since 1971, Prvački has exhibited extensively both locally and abroad. His work is in institutional collections, such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Singapore Art Museum, National Gallery Singapore and Museum of Contemporary Drawing in Nurnberg, among others.

Prvački has garnered multiple awards and honours over his decades-long art practice. He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2011. In 2012, he was conferred the Silver Medallion for Knights in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Embassy, as well as Singapore’s Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts. In 2020, he received the 22^nd Sava Šumanović Fine Art Award, the Serbian national art award for Visual Arts.

This painting is related to the artist’s CONSTRUCTION SITE series of works. It evokes a sense of building and destruction, and of construction and erasure. What we see seems to be a palimpsest after iterations of change. It speaks to Prvački’s personal experience of migration, harking back to a former life, a country and world which he poignantly remarks “does not exist anymore.” He builds a new visual language out of figurative elements, recurring motifs and, at times, titles which are written onto the canvas.