Drina Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition SPECULUM by Miloš Todorović, that will take place in the Aria Art Gallery’s Florentine venue from Saturday 1st of May to 22nd of June 2021, in collaboration with Drina Gallery and Logic Art Space.
Curated by Nataša Radojević and Antonio Budetta
Stimulated by the period of residence in the empty and silence Renaissance city of Florence, the Serbo-French artist searches for ways of devising the portrait to the point where he eliminates all that seems superfluous to him. He leaves only a glance on the canvas - a portrait on a mirroring background presented through only one life sized EYE. His pictorial process is reversed, forms are created through light rather than shadow, where a single subject, the eye, follows the viewer, creating a feeling of invisible presence of mutual gazes.
Faces of lives lived can be seen and imagined through the sharp brushstrokes that outline floating eyes. These individuals, immersed in different shades of blue, represent a cultural heritage that blends with contemporary expressive minimalism.
Each image carries a secret, something mysterious and unfathomable that may not be labeled or fully explained, hidden beneath the mist, between the terrestrial and sublime. Energy vibrations pulse in strong rhythm, going beyond the boundary of the visual, indulging in the power of silence and the intensity of emptiness.
The emotive scheme is further amplified by the 3D audio installation by Augustine Leudar.
The sixteenth-century garden offers another challenge to Milos, a site-specific intervention that should represent the history of the place where he exhibits.
After an introspective and silent period, in which Miloš retired for several years from the art market, he came back to Belgrade where he presented a solo show Apocalypse Insight (22/02/2020 Drina Gallery) – the first solo exhibition in his hometown after 27 years since, at the invitation of academician Vladimir Veličković, he went to Paris to study. A few months later, he arrived in Florence where he completed his first solo exhibition in Italy, Speculum at the Aria Art Gallery.
Speculum series develops ideas and topics manifested by the urge for the visible and (in)tangible, abstract and figurative at the same time - and is a direct continuation of his previous cycle of paintings – Apocalypse Insight - which from today's point of view, seems to be a premonition of the events which have occurred on a global scale.
Miloš Todorović (Belgrade, 1971) studied at ’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he obtained a master degree in painting in 1999.He is the laureate of some of the greatest professional awards in France in the field of painting, such as the prize for painting awarded by the French Academy of Sciences and Arts from the Pierre Cardin Fund.So far, he has shown his artworks in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his paintings have been exhibited along with artworks by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Jean Michel Basquiat, Erro, Combas, Damien Hirst, Mel Ramos, Jannis Kounellis, Douglas Gordon etc. More than a thousand of his artworks have become part of international public and private collections today such as the as the Frissiras Museum / Athens, Pierre Cardin Foundation / Paris, Zepter Collection / Monte Carlo, Bachelot Collection / Paris, James Lubowitz Collection / Taos, New Mexico etc