Milena Jovicevic Popovic

In Untitled 2007, Montenegrin artist, Milena Jovicevic Popovic, evokes a dreamy nostalgia of childhood. She reconfigures snippets of memory, combining Neo-Expressionist style with bouts of tentative figuration. In a sea of vibrant blue, we see the rough outline of a swimming dog, the burning orb of a distant sun, the abstract and the fantastical rendition of a lakeshore, replete with flowers composed of spindly tendrils and blossoms of heavy impasto. She obstructs this vision with patches of white, creating a haziness that implies the fallibility of memory. In an effort to blend recollection with reality, Popovic leaves us with the remnants of a photographic negative, injecting her work with wistfulness for a time long past.
With this particular piece, Popovic takes a different route from her usual figurative, Pop-Art style, which utilizes the appropriation of symbols to create enigmatic puzzles for the viewer to decipher. There is an underlying humor present in her work, which does not belie a more foreboding, macabre current that weaves itself through her canvases.
Milena Jovicevic Popovic was born in Cetinje, Montenegro in 1976. She completed her postgraduate studies at The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has exhibited internationally in France, Italy, Spain and New York.
Persis Singh is a New York-based writer. Milena Jovicevic Popovic is a Montenegro -based artist.