A retrospective exhibition of the Belgrade artist Milovan Destil Marković titled DESTILLED FACE – WORKS 1980-2020 opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska on Thursday, 12 December, at 7 p.m.

The Banja Luka exhibition explores four decades of Marković’s dynamic career as an artist, one of the most prominent figures of the Belgrade art scene back in the 1980s, and the youngest laureate of the Politika Painting Prize.

The Banja Luka retrospective, curated by Miroljub Mima Marjanović, art historian and editor of SEEcult.org, presents several series by Marković, namely, Barcoded Paintings, Transfigurative Works, Eucharist, Prototypes, Portraits, etc., with over 40 monumental works and ambient installations made in different combined techniques.

Marković appropriates the coded language of barcodes – the basic code of communication as used in the market and economic system of neoliberal capitalism – as the essential communicative code of his own painting. The artist renders barcodes as striking colorful interpretations, not as abstract and empty semantic fields, but as visual fields replete with coded content and significations, representative of his essentially critically hued testimony and interpretation of the contemporary world.

Prior to the Banja Luka retrospective, Marković had an exhibition at the Cultural Centre of Belgrade, which was titled BARCODED PAINTING. The two exhibitions are a joint project of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska, the Cultural Centre of Belgrade and the SEEcult.org Portal for South-East European Culture.

A remarkable comprehensive monograph dedicated to Marković’s rich oeuvre has been published to accompany the show, with texts authored by Danijela Purešević, Benedikt Stegmayer, Bojana Pejić, Boris Buden and Miroljub Mima Marjanović.

Milovan Destil Marković (1957) was one of the key figures of the Belgrade art scene back in the 1980s. He studied at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Art, where he initiated the opening of the Belgrade cult club Akademija. It was a time when painting made a comeback, with Marković and Vlasta Mikić co-founding the Žestoki Group in 1982. The year of 1986 was a turning point for the artist: he won the prestigious Politika Painting Prize, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and moved to Berlin, where he has been based to this day.

Marković has had many solo and collaborative exhibitions around the world, among which the 42^nd Venice Biennale, Aperto; 4^th Istanbul Biennale; 46^th Venice Biennale; 6^th Triennale, New Delhi; 5th Cetinje Biennale, 19^th Sao Paulo Biennial; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto, Kumamoto; MoMA PS1, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Ludwig Museum for Contemporary Art, Budapest; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken; Artists’ Museum, Łódź; National Museum, Prague; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Belgrade City Museum; Landesmuseum, Graz; Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf; Art Museum Foundation – Military Museum, Istanbul; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg; Kunstvoreningen, Bergen; Galleri F15, Oslo; Nishido Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fei Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai and many others. 

Marković’s works can be seen in museums in Berlin, Kumamoto, Belgrade, Düsseldorf, Łódź, Duisburg, Graz and Prijepolje, as well as in many private collections.

The exhibition is on view until 25 February 2020.