Artist: Mihael Milunović

There is a category of person – bureaucrat, officer, executive, host – whose entire authority depends on our agreement not to ask what‘s underneath the uniform. Milunović‘s paintings are what happens when someone asks anyway.

Walk through this exhibition and you will meet very few people. You will meet a great many surfaces standing where people are supposed to be: a suit with no one inside it, a black oval balanced on a chair where a torso should sit, a figure whose face has simply been withheld, a crowd of clowns doing violence to a filing cabinet. Milunović has spent this body of work removing the person and leaving the role standing – and then, almost against his own better judgment, letting something escape from inside it anyway. A hand reaches out of the black hole toward a stack of bricks. A woman keeps writing, unbothered, while a costume war breaks out three feet from her desk. Something is always leaking out of the costume. That leak is the whole exhibition.

It would be easy – too easy – to call this a critique of institutions, of power, of the suits and desks and briefing rooms that recur across the canvases like a stage set that never quite gets struck. But Milunović is not an angry painter, and this is not an angry show. He has lived through actual history – a childhood inside a country that dissolved, a family that crossed the lines history insisted on drawing, cities and languages accumulated rather than chosen – and something in that history seems to have inoculated him against easy contempt for the people who dress up and perform seriousness. He knows better than most that the uniform is often the only thing holding a person together. So the suits in this show are not villains. They are simply hollow, the way most performances of authority are hollow, and he paints that hollowness with something closer to tenderness than accusation. (…)

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