Milan Markovich

Milan Markovich is one of those artists whose single-minded concentration on his own creative work has helped him to attain growing recognition both in Austria and abroad. For some time now, he is no longer on the sidelines of the rapidly changing contemporary art scene but has become an indispensable element in today´s artistic development in Austria. Markovich´s partial independence from contemporary artistic creations and developments gives him a unique position in contemporary painting, because his art is concerned with depth and plasticity, particularly the depiction of sculpture, the modelling and the anatomy of the human body.

He was born in Vojevodina but grew up in Vienna where he studied for one year with Professor Oberhuber at the Academy of Applied Arts before moving to the traditional Art Students League in New York. Here, under the tutelage of Robert Beverly Hale, a former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he discovered and developed his true calling and his love for the depiction of plasticity in a flat medium.

It seems that the main theme of his oeuvre is the human body, its torsions and various perspectives and views; in some of these works his pastose handling is reminiscent of Francis Bacon. His scratched-of, frequently dynamic renderings of human torso-like bodies is marked by the contrasts of peace and movement, internalisation and prominent plasticity.

Sometimes his paintings create the impression that in his heart of hearts Milan Markovich is really a sculptor trying to transfer the three-dimensional idiom of sculpture onto a flatness marked by spatial depth and a three-dimensional quality. A plastic artist who works in a two-dimensional medium but whose idiom creates its own spatial reality. An artist whose development-potential still leaves numerous options for the future and whose future creations we await with much interest.