Painting is a process. It takes time to experiment, and to experiment with the material until you find something that you feel is ‘finished’. It is collaboration between what I am trying to express and what is expressed through or by the material. I build an idea from my own experiences and with the situation of painting. I usually start off with an intuition, an abstract idea that I transfer and transform on the canvas. It is in the process of adding and discovering that the painting finds its ‘subject’. I have always been interested in colour, shapes, and texture. Painting in the studio and on the white wall is not the same. Sometimes the occasion and the space provide the painting situation with more. Oen I work on more than one painting at the same time. It gives me new ideas and sometimes the differences can provide solutions. Something I would not get, I think, by painting a painting one at a time. Also, when I have my routine, I catch myself on doing the same movement all the time with the same material, so once in a while I need to unlearn myself from technic and material. In this cycle I try to reduce material and work through a kind of melancholy in texture and colour. In previous work I did not want to express state of emotions I rather searched for what could be called a realistic setting. Today I would say I am trying to get the process of paining to remain in the ‘finished’ work. Being in the situation with the materials, colours textures and shapes that the experiment creates trough time is something I try to focus on.

I work with my family as an intersection. Through painting, have slowly found form, color and format for an closed ongoing drama from which I myself have partly fled away to stand by and watch. Most of the paintings have become scenographic, some others as small cutouts or detached stills. It’s the drama that’s going on, we’re for looking into these rooms but we cant completely decode them. Some things come back and in many ways I work as a director or scenographer. I use my artistic tools to drill down the epicenter of family trauma and the repercussions and ripples these create. I let the paintings become what in psychology are called transitional objects. A place where a story is relegated, materialized, and cared for. Every painting situation creates its own needs and my work is engaged in staying attentive to this setting and how it changes and changes me.

Monika Milivojevic (Zagreb, 1993.) based in Stockholm, Sweden.
In 2012 she enrolled in the undergraduate studies at the Painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
She graduated painting in 2017, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
Year 2020 she graduated with a MFA from The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.
She has been rewarded with grants from Sven Erixsons minnesfond (2021) and Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts (2020)

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2020. Graduation Show, The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm
2020. Return, solo exhibition at Galleri Mejan, Stockholm
2017. 20th Miniatures, Pro3or gallery in Beograd
2017. 20th Miniatures, Novi Dvori, Zapresic
2016. “Arti-Parti” vol. 5,6,7, student exhibit, Klovićevi dvori, Zagreb
2016. Night of the Museums – group exhibit – City of Đurđevac Museum
2016. Student exhibit of Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb, outer entrance hall Vatroslav Lisinski
2015. Bauhaus project – group exhibit – Contemporary Museum Zagreb (MSU)
2015. “Arti-Parti” vol. 4, student exhibit, Oris – House of Architecture, Zagreb
2014. Arti-Parti” vol.3, student exhibit, Oris – House of Architecture, Zagreb
2011. Obrazine, Exhibition space of the “Zvončarske” museum collection , Opatija