| << MILICA LUKIC and MIROSLAV PERKOVIC: SHARED POETICS Over the past few years, I have been following the works of Milica Lukic and Miroslav Perkovic with marked interest. I first became acquainted with her work in 1991 at the time of the first of her two one-man shows held in the Gallery La Kabala in Madrid. The coordinates to which her work then belonged were not overly different to those chosen by the majority of the best Spanish artists of her generation at the time: a partiality towards the abstract, an encounter with the lyric tradition with a capacity to make that tradition compatible and a constructive perserverance while working on forms, something that was always clearly present in our environment in the works of Sicilia, Campano or Juan Usle. Milica Lukic's second Madrid exhibition held in 1994 showed a significant evolution of her stands. Making that extra turn, she left any trace of indecision behind-of experessionistic effusion and gestures in order to concetrate on constructing pieces in metal, balancing between a painting, which takes its place on the wall with certain color zones: black, red, blue, yellow- and a sculpture in which one ought to respect what they contain of the post-minimalistic and neo-suprematic or neo-neoplastic elements. At the time of this second Madrid one-man show, Milica Lukic and Miroslav Perkovic had already been living in Spain for some time, in Mojacar, owing to the scholarship from 1992. They occasionally reside in Madrid and Valencia. In 1995 in Madrid in the Circulo de Bellas Artes, they took part in the activities of a sculptural workshop lead by British sculptor Richard Deacon. The same year, Milica receives an important first award for sculpture in Valencia, Premio Bancaixa. In Mojacar, Miroslav Perkovic exhibits steel and glass installations. As with the works executed in Spain as well as with these which they shall present at their Belgrade exhibition, Milica Lukic and Miroslav Perkovic, while individually signing their works, share a basic concept which shows a readiness to continue experimenting mainly in metal- they occasionally intervene with less solid materials, such as glass or plexiglass- within the possibilities of construction, geometry, the 'less is more' minimal dictionary, heritage of Tony Smith, Donald Judd or Sol Lewitt, but also taken from the music of Phill Glass i.e. Steve Reich, with simultaneous consciousness that beside these grand 20th Century figures there would be little sense in striving to exist in that space without a certain dosage of scepticism towards closed programs, towards dogmas. Essentially, the dialogue which is established here between the orthogonal volumes on the wall (Milica Lukic) and the oval forms on the ground which could be regarded as metaphors (Miroslav Perkovic who in other situations forms simple lines in gallery space corners, in the framework of a puristic line taken over from Julio Gonzalez and his 'drawings in space') speaks of a certain poetic construction, but also of a certain poetic fragility. Of poetics of geometry but also of poetics of emotion which is corrected by it. Of poetics of structure but also of poetics of meditation. Of poetics of objects but also and above all else- of the poetics of the process of creating that object. JUAN MANUEL BONET, May 1996, Valencia Essay "Shared Poetic", by Juan Manuel Bonet, From the Catalogue of Brodotehnika Project, Grant of Soros Found, Belgarde 1995 Slides, From "Objects", Show of M.Lukic & M.Perkovic, Gallery of KCB, Belgrade 1995 |