Radenko Milak

Radenko Milak (1980, Travnik former Yugoslavia) currently lives and works in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He graduated from the Academy of Art, University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2003, and from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Art Belgrade in 2007. He mainly creates paintings, watercolors, drawings and animation films. In 2012 he was awarded with the Premio Combat Prize for Drawing in Italy. His works have been frequently exhibited at prestigious international art events such as the 57th Venice Biennale, where he represented Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Kampala Biennale in Uganda and the 57th edition of the October Salon in Belgrade. His works can be found in several public collections, such as the Folkwang Museum in Germany, the Albertina Museum in Vienna and The Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Radenko Milak’s focus is on the relationship with reality and history through the transformation of photographs into paintings. He translates press photos from printed media and the internet into meticulously detailed watercolors in soft black-and-white tones creating intimate pictorial references to current events. By consciously translating these images from one medium to another, he reinforces the message of the original image. This process allows him to transfer these messages from the past to the present, stimulating the viewer to re-evaluate forgotten and invisible realities. As such, topics like major world catastrophes, wars, global environmental crises.

His newest body of work primarily addresses the two major crises which the world is dealing with: the environmental crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The socially and politically committed Milak puts these two crises into perspective, while simultaneously juxtaposing them and connecting them to each other, creating a thought-provoking, dynamic watercolors. Milak invites the viewer to think about the issues at hand and sparks debate, for example by questioning the way governments worldwide reacted to the COVID-19 threat compared to the threat of climate change, and in suggesting that there is no longer room for national politics in a globalized world.

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