Radenko Milak

Radenko on his current work: ‘The first part of my production is watercolors, which I implemented mainly on paper Arches, 300 grams, 100% cotton. My approach to painting is based on black pigment and white paper, watercolors based on documentary photos, photojournalism, old newspapers, postcards, posters, documentary movies and other propaganda archives. My practice as an artist has always been heavily influenced by the idea that our relationship to the world and its history is largely determined by the uninterrupted and continuous flow of images that documents the world.
In 2013, I completed a project called “365”.  “365, Image of Time” is large-scale series of watercolors that create historical panoramas depicting geo-political themes, ideologies and disasters from the 20th century until today. The project consisted to paint each day during one year a black and white watercolor image of an event that occurred the same day, related to modern and contemporary history. The event could be political, tied to conflicts, to the life of ideas and the arts, to scientific or technological progress. The result symbolized the landscape, through the image, of the short but intense history of the 20th century, as I see it, as I understand it. During the exhibition of this series at the Kusnthalle of Darmstadt, I was able to see just how this landscape, through the image, met with that of others. Everyone could identify with this fresco. For me, the role, the nature of  the Image today is crucial, especially in the era of digital revolution, also I am very interested to understand the status of image today as a political fact.  To use them and to construct them as new versions of stories. This Relationship has become even more important with the expansion of social networks and new information technologies. I’ve placed at the heart of my activity as a painter the question of what a painting could be at the age of the digital time and continuous accessibility to images. This global corpus of images, impossible to mentally embrace in its entirety, vast as it has become, is one of the fundamental elements of our imagination, be it individual or collective.
The second part of my work is based on the post-war trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The project deals with the media, photojournalism, and presentation of war crimes. Twenty-four part series of black-and-white painted representation of this image takes its title from the photographer Ron Haviv. When asked by a journalist, “And what else did you see?”, Haviv replied, “I couldn’t see everything!”. This photograph depicting one of Arkan’s soldiers brutally hitting with his foot a wounded and dying woman, on the pavement in Bjeljina in 1992, at the very beginning of war, circled the globe and became one of the most recognizable media icons of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This project was presented at the exhibition Bild Gegen Bild, in the Haus der Kunst in Munich 2012.
Last part of my work can be called an obsession, research date as events, and historical events. That was the starting point of my collaboration with the artist Roman Uranjek (Slowenische Neue Kunst, NSK)  for a joint project titled Dates’

Public Collections:

Folkwang Museum, Essen

Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg

Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt

Jewish Museum, Frankfurt

National Art Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo

Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska, Banja Luka

City of Lyon

Private Collections:

agnès b.

Art Collection Telekom