Milena Čubraković

Milena Čubraković graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, completing a specialized course in 1953. She started to exhibit of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia in 1952. She had solo exhibitions in Belgrade: in 1958 and 1959 (in the Museum of Applied Arts). In the same year, she moved to Rome where she would form her artistic physiognomy. Solo exhibitions in Rome: 1961, The Ernesto Basso Foundation, 1962, the Stagni Gallery, 1973, Etneo film. She took part in the Forme presenti exhibition in the Scorpio Gallery in 1965. She became a member of the Illumination group, and exhibited her work at the group’s only show in L’Argentario Gallery in Trento in 1967. She renewed her contacts with the Belgrade art scene through her participation in the III Triennale in Belgrade 1967, and the October Salon in 1968. She had a solo exhibition in Sarajevo in 1970, and in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 1973. The artistic maturation of Milena Čubraković took place under condition (which she shared with Mira Brtka) of stimulative atmosphere of the Rome art scene of “after informalism“ (Dopo l’informale, according to a title of an exhibition in San Marino in 1963). Namely, in a situation of the total renewal of Italian society during the 1960s, there was, in the current Roman art, a polemic politization between local versions of pop art and new figurations on one side, and new tendencies of geometric abstraction on the other side of this spectrum of ideas and languages. Precisely in such a context, there was a formation in Rome in 1967 of the Illumination group by the Japanese artist Nobuya Abe who was a spiritual mentor of this six-member art community to which both Brtka and Čubraković belonged. The name and character of this group assumed an ideal of “enlightenment“ or “illumination“ on the basis of ancient oriental spiritual teachings which were expressed in visual arts in their condensed forms as a kind of visual haiku poetry. For objects by Milena Čubraković, the Roman critic Giuseppe Gatt said that “her geometric form… was never fully rational, and it is suggested as a hypothesis of a language suitable to become a means of communication and, at the same time, an element of human wholeness“. Very important in her oeuvre are objects which she dubbed Projection (Proiezione), of different sizes, which are based on a balance of relief segments of triangular and semi-circular form.