God Will Forgive Me (2025), marble & glass mosaic, 29.7 x 41 cm
‘Is that what freedom is?’ he thought. ‘He has acted: and now he can’t go back: it must seem strange to him to feel behind him an unknown act, which he has already almost ceased to understand, and which will turn his life upside down. All I do, I do for nothing. It might be said that I am robbed of the consequences of my acts: everything happens as thought I could always play my strokes again. I don’t know what I would give to do something irrevocable.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, The Age of Reason (1947)
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Inconsistent with the magical, dreamlike scenes, more mechanical fantasies are also present, where a sense of how the works are created seems surprisingly conspicuous. Labour-intensive practices are at play where the act of construction or deconstruction rule as reflection on our fragile moment in time. Remnants of materials, or cutouts of old paintings are weaved through the materials of the now to create dreamlike structures. Structures or forms that feel indicative of an imagined land far far away.
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excerpt from the press release / credits TWILIGHT CONTEMPORARY (2025)
Slow and steady wins the race. Rush it and you'll end up with problems that will be more time-consuming than if you'd just taken it slowly in the first place.
You can redo a single course you've just laid, but it's a lot harder to sort out a problem four courses deep.
(anonymous bricklayer)
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Brick I.I/II/III/IV/V/VI (2024), plaster, glass, ceramic, 21.5 x 7.3 x 10.25 cm
Brick I.I/II/III/IV/V/VI was commissioned by House of Voltaire.
It celebrates the common imperial brick, highlighting its rudimentary design, modular quality and aesthetics. Tiled in either ceramic or glass, these handmade brick replicas elevate the mundane into the extraordinary, inviting contemplation of an everyday object that forms the basis of a built environment. Click shop for more details.
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Horn (2023), oil on canvas, 30 x 35 cm
Still (2023), oil on canvas, 30 x 25 cm
A work of art is not merely a contest between form and nature, but it also reveals the world view behind it. The gap between external and internal existence can be bridged if the relationship of the work of art to time and space is considered, that is, if its spatial and temporal characteristics are examined. Thus, Egyptian art avoids all reference to transitory things. It never portrays a moment of time to be read at a single glance... Transitory motifs are avoided and a world of completed actions is always depicted. A pair of scales is always in equilibrium, and ship in the builder's yard has just been completed, and so on. The Egyptian artist always showed every action in potentia and not in actu. Frightened by time because it is transitory, he sought to overcome time through space.
WALTER WOLFF, Early Civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Aegean (1989)
installation view, Things Happen All The Time, Slugtown
installation view, Things Happen All The Time, Slugtown
Things Happen All the Time features the work of artists who explore what it means to cede control. For some that comes through employing chance and luck in their practice. For others, they explore ritual and ruling systems.Ana Milenkovic chooses to paint those who wield the power to influence. Hanging at the entrance to the exhibition is a closely cropped portrait of Elon Musk. He holds a hand over his mouth in a pose that conveys introspective musing, or perhaps boredom. Either way, his presence as the only recognisable portrait looms over the exhibition like a spectre. He doesn't hold our gaze, but he’s watching. His is an insidious power. His algorithm seeping into daily lives, holding sway over what we see and what we don’t.
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In Penny, an image of British politician Penny Mordaunt, Milenkovic repositions the focus from the MP to the red ministerial folder Mordaunt holds in her hands. The cropping is tight, disregarding the politician entirely save for the work’s title, and making the plush leather-bound folder the central focus. In doing so, this inanimate, banal object, replete with the tabs of multi-coloured dividers, becomes much more than that. It is an object that despite, and perhaps because of, its simple everydayness, is made sinister by its contents and who is holding it. A simple red folder with the power to influence the lives of so many, but brandished by a representative of a party focused solely on its own self-preservation.
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Unlike Elon, and Penny, there is no subject in Chit-Chat. Nothing is the subject. A gap, a blank space. Much of the surface depicts the sleek leather interior of a car under the light of camera flash from a press photographer. On either flank are slivers of two people, their faces all but cropped out. Clad in a magenta hat and matching jacket it becomes clear one is the late Queen Elizabeth II, the other, also in a hat and pinstripe blazer (that looks expensive – even in paint) evidently another royal. Milenkovic’s painting is soaked with tension, painting the space between the figures as a claustrophobic vacuum. It brings the monarchy, its legitimacy and purpose under the bright heat of the spotlight at a time when the once powerful institution is wobbling like never before.
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excerpt from the press release / credits SLUGTOWN (2024)
Elon (2023), 35 x 25 cm, oil on canvas
And then happiness had become a reality. It had come over him with its ecstasies and raptures, its secret shudders and tremors, its sudden sobs, its entire exuberant and insatiable intoxication … Admittedly, the cheap violins of the orchestra had failed a little during the prelude, and a fat, conceited A man with a full, bread-blond beard had swum up in the boat, a little jerkily. His guardian, Mr. Stephan Kistenmaker, had also been present in the neighboring box and grumbled that the boy was being distracted in this way and diverted from his duties. But the sweet and transfigured splendor to which he was listening had lifted him above all that...And finally the end had come. The singing, shimmering happiness had fallen silent and died out, he had found himself back at home in his room with a feverish head and had realized that only a few hours of sleep in his bed separated him from the grayness of everyday life. Then he had been overcome by a fit of that complete despondency that he knew so well. He had felt again how painful beauty is, how deeply it plunges into shame and yearning despair and yet also consumes courage and fitness for ordinary life. It had weighed him down so terribly hopeless and overwhelming that he had once again said to himself that there must be more than his personal worries that was weighing on him, a burden that had weighed down his soul from the very beginning and would have to suffocate it at some point...Then he had set the alarm and slept, as deeply and deadly as one sleeps when one never wishes to wake up again. And now Monday had come, and it was six o'clock, and he had not worked for an hour!
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FELLINI 8 1/2
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And between two wars, untouched and peaceful in the folds of his pinafore dress and the curls of his soft hair, little Johann plays the games of his 4½ years in the garden by the fountain or on the "balcony" which is separated from the forecourt of the second floor by a small pillared platform especially for him... These games, the depth and charm of which no adult can understand, and for which nothing more is needed than three pebbles or a piece of wood, perhaps with a dandelion flower as a helmet: but above all the pure, strong, fervent, chaste, still undisturbed and unintimidated imagination of that blissful age when life is still afraid to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares to lay a hand on us, when we can see, hear, laugh, marvel and dream without the world demanding services from us... when the impatience of those we would like to love does not yet torment us for signs and first proofs that we have fulfilled these We will be able to perform our duties efficiently... Ah, not much longer, and everything will fall upon us with overwhelming force to rape us, to exercise us, to stretch us, to shorten us, to destroy us...​
THOMAS MANN, Buddenbrooks, The Decline of a Family (1902)
CEZARY BODZIANOWSKI
installation view, Quietism, Brooke Benington
Our human center does not lie in ourselves, but in the authority to which we submit. We do not arrive at well-being by our own productive activity, but by passive obedience and the ensuing approval by the authority. We have a leader (secular or spiritual, king/queen or God) in whom we have faith; we have security… as long as we are – nobody. That submission is not necessarily conscious as such, that it can be mild or severe, that the psychic and social structure need not be totally authoritarian, but may be only partially so, must not blind us to the fact that we live in the mode of having to the degree that we internalize the authoritarian structure of our society.
ERICH FROMM, To Have or To Be (1976)
installation view, Quietism, Brooke Benington
installation view, Quietism, Brooke Benington
Quietism by Ana Milenkovic presents a new series of paintings which demonstrate a marked evolution of her previous practice. Rather than drawing upon literature and historic mythologies for her subjects, she examines how public and cultural figures who represent us as a society are mythologised in our media - held up as heroes and villains or otherwise dehumanised. The title of the exhibition, Quietism, comes from a dialogue in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Prince Myshkin, an embodiment of goodness and virtue, returns to Russia from abroad, where unintentionally, he gets pulled into society and its intricacies. Unaware of the social codes, relationships and individual vanities, he comes across as inept and foolish. The exhibited paintings are based on fragments from press photographs and the artist’s own objects and images. Torn out of context, familiar figures and objects can be interpreted according to the viewer’s beliefs and assumptions. The series continues the artist’s interest in heroisms, in particular, those taking our assumed values and principles to extremes, transitioning from the mundane to the extraordinary. The painting’s imbalanced compositions, in which characters and objects play secondary roles, reflect the artist’s struggle to process information - received through the media and her own social interactions. The rush of fractured information and the unabating speed in which it is delivered results in a tendency to sensationalise in favour of considered opinions, informed decisions and lasting emotions. However, Milenkovic assures us that the artworks are not created in anger or despondence - rather, she tries to capture the uplifting moments of clarity and determination. She asserts that as overwhelming as the pace and variety of media is - it can also be incredibly inspiring. We are allowed a unique position in history to draw influence from everywhere at once, without dogma or direction.
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excerpt from the press release / credits Brooke Benington (2023)
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Mission (2023), 30 x 50 cm, oil on canvas
Human beings are the only living creatures who have this choice – of following the part that is great, or the part that is trivial. The difference depends upon the unique human faculty of imagination. When an animal is in a dull situation, it becomes dull; the fiercest of all birds, the hawk, becomes quiescent when a black bag is placed over its head. Man's superior consciousness means that he can see further; his sense of purpose stretches into the distance. But we are still 99 per cent animal; few of us bother to develop this unique capacity. We drift along from day to day, becoming bored when things are dull, depressed when immediate prospects look poor, using our powers of foresight and imagination only when confronted by an interesting challenge, and allowing them to lie fallow in between. And this situation, we must admit, applies most of the time to all of us, including the Beethovens and Einsteins. 'Involvement' is our common lot. But what makes us uniquely human are the strange moments of non-involvement. The pressure vanishes. Suddenly we are seeing life from a distance, as if we were gods; seeing it from above, from a bird's-eye view rather than the usual worm's-eye view. In these moments of optimism and affirmation, it seems absurd that we should ever have sunk into a condition of depression or defeat, for it is suddenly obvious that we are undefeatable and indestructible.
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COLIN WILSON The Occult (1971)
CEZARY BODZIANOWSKI
installation view, We Will Take Your Technology And Your Money, School Gallery (2023)
We Will Take Your Technology And Your Money features three new paintings drawn from press images representing individual success, political power, and high culture. The paintings are displayed against blown up stills from Adam Curtis’ 2015 documentary Bitter Lake. Milenkovic offers a fragmented perspective, focusing on aspects that could otherwise be irrelevant or overlooked, creating alternate zoomed-in compositions of familiar imagery. For Bitter Lake Adam Curtis provides a politically driven monologue over cleverly stitched together BBC archive footage creating a seamless audio-visual masterpiece. One of the narratives focuses on past governments from Russia and the West, highlighting their continued and largely failing interventions in Afghanistan and the simplified stories created by the west about Militant Islam. The opening monologue states “Increasingly we live in a world where nothing makes any sense. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow”. In a similar way We Will Take Your Technology And Your Money offers a fragmented collage of the artists simplified interpretation of loaded media imagery – creating her own alternative narrative. Milenkovic was inspired by Cutis’ ability to compare grandiose ideas with their mundane realisation. A further reading list has been provided by Milenkovic to share the literary, philosophical, and musical influences that fed the realisation of these works. These are more clues, meant as triggers, references, or ear worms in a maieutic manner. Maieutic comes from ‘maieutikos’, the Greek word for ‘of midwifery’ and is a teaching style synonymous with the Socratic Method of helping a person to bring forth and become aware of latent ideas or memories. Like in midwifery, you can only be assisted in giving birth to your understanding, something you must inevitably do yourself.
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excerpt from the press release / credits School Gallery (2023)
installation view, M I C R O M E G A S - Juliette Ezaoui and Ana Milenkovic, Studio Voltaire
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Alas, said the Saturnian, we live only five hundred complete revolutions of the Sun. So you see, it’s like dying practically the instant you’re born. Our existence is but a point, our lifespan a moment, our globe an atom.’(…)Micromegas answered him: (…) as you know only too well, when the moment comes to return one’s body to the elements and to reanimate nature in a different form – what they call dying - when this moment of metamorphosis comes, it makes absolutely no difference whether you lived and eternity or one single day. (I have been in places where they live a thousand times longer than we do, and I found that still they grumbled.)
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VOLTAIRE, Micromegas (1752)
The collaboration with Julette Ezaoui takes inspiration from Micromegas, Voltaire’s story of a giant alien who, along with a friend from Saturn, travels to Earth and encounters humanity. Despite humans’ tiny size, the visitors recognise their intelligence. Before departing, they give humanity a book meant to reveal the purpose of existence, but when the book is opened, its pages are blank—suggesting that ultimate meaning is beyond easy comprehension.
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Building on this theme, we delve into the relationship between the vast and the minuscule, exploring how universal truths often emerge in the smallest, most overlooked details—like a crumb on a rug, moss spores in a garden, or a kiwi skin rotting in compost. The project invites viewers to shift perspectives, encouraging them to zoom in on mundane objects and discover how they reflect larger ideas and designs that shape our understanding of the world.
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The installation creates an imagined cosmos: an in-between space where objects coexist at various scales and dimensions. As viewers explore an array of two-dimensional pieces, installations, bronze sculptures, and everyday objects arranged on shelves at varying heights, they’ll encounter clues to the intricacies of this miniature universe. Unsure of the scale or nature of its inhabitants, visitors will rely on their own assumptions and experiences to interpret the objects’ relationships, functions, and meanings, immersing themselves in a world that blurs the line between the familiar and the mysterious.
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excerpt from the artists statement for Studio Voltaire (2024)
installation view, BURIED, OHSH Projects (2024)
installation view, BURIED, OHSH Projects (2024)
BURIED illuminates the ancient and ancestral knowledge that lays beneath the surface of humankind. The exhibition seeks to resurrect stories buried or blurred over centuries, bringing to light the forgotten remnants of history and the echoes of our collective heritage. The timeless narratives of myths transcend generations, imparting wisdom, morality, and cultural identity. They are dynamic and ever-evolving expressions of the collective human imagination, which become buried, blurred, or preserved for countless reasons.
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The resurrection and transformation does not end here, Ana Milenkovic presents us with a monumental couple transitioning from corporeal to celestial existence, named after the main characters from Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Buried Giant’ (Beatrice), the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (Gilgamesh) and, alternatively, Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (Ivan). The couple embodies human concerns about our own temporality and the meaning of life. While Mark Jackson’s larger than life painting is literally ‘raising the ancient dead with pure intonation.
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excerpt from the press release / credits OHSH Projects (2024)
We can see that neurosis is par excellence the danger of a symbolicanimal whose body is a problem to him. Instead of living biologically, then, he lives symbolically. Instead of living in the partway that nature provided for he lives in the total way made possible by symbols. One substitutes the magical, all-inclusive world ofthe self for the real, fragmentary world of experience. Again, in thisj sense, everyone is neurotic, as everyone holds back from life in someJ ways and lets his symbolic world-view arrange things: this is whatcultural morality is for.16 In this sense, too, the artist is the mostneurotic because he too takes the world as a totality and makes alargely symbolic problem out of it.
The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that, thusskeletally supported, they can bear the burden of their flesh. Under thesign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved from theinfantile desire to be and have everything.
ERNEST BECKER, The Denial Of Death (1973)
Domino (2022), 48.5 x 56 cm, oil on canvas
Eel (2022), 48.5 x 56 cm, oil on canvas
The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. Now I myself felt his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist.
ZELIG, 1983
Sue (2021), 183 x 115 cm, oil on canvas
What is this?' he asked himself, 'I experience in her company moments of abstraction and even of boredom. She is ruining herself for me, and it is thus that I reward her. Can I indeed be wicked?' This question would have troubled him little when he was ambitious; then, not to succeed in life was the only disgrace in his eyes.His moral uneasiness, in Mathilde's presence, was all the more marked, in that he inspired in her at that moment the most extraordinary and insensate passion. She could speak of nothing but the strange sacrifices which she was anxious to make to save him.Carried away by a sentiment of which she was proud and which completely overbore her pride, she would have liked not to allow a moment of her life to pass that was not filled with some extraordinary action. The strangest plans, the most perilous to herself, formed the theme of her long conversations with Julien. His gaolers, well rewarded, allowed her to have her way in the prison. Mathilde's ideas were not confined to the sacrifice of her reputation; it mattered nothing to her though she made her condition known to the whole of society. To fling herself on her knees to crave pardon for Julien, in front of the King's carriage as it came by at a gallop, to attract the royal attention, at the risk of a thousand deaths, was one of the tamest fancies of this exalted and courageous imagination. Through her friends who held posts at court, she could count upon being admitted to the reserved parts of the park of Saint-Cloud.Julien felt himself to be hardly worthy of such devotion, to tell the truth he was tired of heroism. It would have required a simple, artless, almost timid affection to appeal to him, whereas on the contrary, Mathilde's proud spirit must always entertain the idea of a public, of what people would say.
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STENDHAL, The Red and The Black (1830)
Jimmie (2021), 183 x 115 cm, oil on canvas
somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near
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your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
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or if your wish be to close me, I and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending
(...)
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installation view, Holy Grail, OHSH Projects
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installation view, Grimoire, Three Works
The Three Kings (2020), 183 x 395, oil on canvas
installation view, Grimoire, Three Works
Untitled (2020), 44.5 x 29 cm, oil on canvas, steel
I repeat, moderate your demands. Don't demand from me everything great and beautiful and you'll see how well we shall get on together, the gentleman declared impressively. You are really angry with me because I haven't appeared to you in a red glow, in thunder and lightning, with scorched wings, but have introduced myself in so modest a form. You are hurt, first of all, in your aesthetic feelings, and secondly, in your pride: how could such a vulgar devil come to visit such a great man?​
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MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, The Master And Margarita (1967)
Caelia (2020), 18.5 x 14 x 1.3 cm each, plaster, wax, oil, steel
Blasphemous Witticism (2019), 29.7 x 21 cm, oil on canvas
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installation view, Rosshalde, Ravnikar
installation view, Aqbar Space
Wet and dirty, I trudged onward, and as the damp walls pressed closer together above us, the guide began to sing his old song of comfort. With each step he took, he kept the beat with his clear, strong, young voice: “I will, I will, I will!” I knew quite well that he wanted to encourage me, to spur me on. He wanted to delude me and make me forget the horrible hardship and despair of this hellish journey. I knew he waited for me to chime in with his sing-song. But I refused to do it. I did not want to grant him this victory. Didn’t I feel like singing? Wasn’t I merely human, just a poor simple guy who had been drawn into doing things against my feelings that not even God would demand of me? Wasn’t each carnation and each forget-me-not allowed to stay alongside the brook where it was growing, to bloom and wither in its own way?
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HERMANN HESSE, The Difficult Path (1917)
installation view, Difficult Path, School Gallery
What Is To Be Done? (2019), 230 x 150 cm, oil on canvas
installation view, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Novembar Gallery
​​A very important Saint like Simeon Stylites, transcended the merely curative. Simeon was without fear of the emperor, for example. What could the emperor do to him that was worse than living at the top of a pillar, after all?​​ So the role of the holy man in society is of somebody who has a heroic ability denied to most ordinary people. This is a spiritual superhero who, like comic book superheroes, isn't just a superhero for his own benefit. He doesn't just fly around because he likes the sensation of flying around. But who helps those who are weaker than him.​​
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PAUL FREEDMAN, The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000; Introduction to Monasticism (October 19, 2011)
JOHN ROMER - Byzantium: The Lost Empire (1997)
Headspace (2018), 49 x 47 cm, unique giclée print, plaster, enamel paint
It Feels So Good /in the bay (2018), 135 x 130 x 85 cm, mixed media
Monster (2018), 49 x 47 cm, unique giclée print
Thus the will-to-form of the artist gives objective expression, in his work, to the soul’s tendency to self-eternalization, while the aesthetic pleasure of the enjoyer is enabled, by his oneness with it, to participate in this objectivization of immortality. But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.
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OTTO RANK, Art & Artist (1932)
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Swim (2018), 56 x 50 cm, oil on canvas
Three (2018), 35 x 25 cm, oil on board
Poseidon (2018), 35 x 25 cm, oil on board