Sava Stepanov

The Art of Mira Brtka

Almost the entire ouevre of Mira Brtka is based upon on the analytic concept of a work of art (a painting, a sculpture, a collage, a tapestry, an object, a film, a video). Purity of the formal effect, non-expressivity, problematizing and philosophizing of the form and painting or sculpture, as well as the language consistency in her art have never interrupted the social functionalization of her expression. The statement of Mira Brtka is close to primary modernistic principles, those principles which are confirmed in the theses of Philibert Menna, who writes that modernistic art has no intention of separating itself from social milieu. Instead, through its plastic constitution, it strives to impose onto its environment the principles “applicable“ to the cognition and interpretation of the world in which the artist lives and creates.

The hitherto art of Mira Brtka has been based on a permanent creation of form as the bearer of authentic plastic principles and universal meanings and messages. Such an attitude was formed immediately after she graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts in Rome in 1964. This very conception of an image has helped her to deal with authentic problems of a pictorial structure and to place her permanently in the field of painting. In addition to this, as a graduate student of painting, Brtka was already a mature person with an interesting and rich creative experience (film), which is the reason why her initial attempts and devoid of insecurity. Through her consequent research-oriented attitude, she would grapple the issue of informalism and then she would remove layers of paint on her paintings, and reach the painting of geometry and, in one series of paintings, even monochromatic. Her developmental path was noticed and, as a result, Mira Brtka joined an important international group called Illumination, founded in Italy in 1967 by a Japanese artist, Nobuya Abe. Other members of this group were people like Marcia Hafif, a well-known American artist of today, Paolo Patelli and Aldo Schmid from Italy, Milena Čubraković and others. The basic concept of this group was imposed by Abe in an attempt to enrich the principle of a condensed form and geometry with contemplation and spirituality. Up to a point, Mira Brtka followed these principles but soon, guided by her own sensibility, arrived at the painting of intensive flat painted fields with hard edges. Such accomplishments have included this artist into the Arteideologia international movement headquartered in Italy. This movement originated at the time when the Bureau of Preventive Imagination was active in Rome in 1970, and Brtka took part in it with an international group of artists (some of these people were great artists like Boyce [Bois?], Christo, Pistoletto, Richter and others).

Mira Brtka had her first solo exhibition in this region in the beginning of the 1970s, and her painting concept at the time was quite a refreshment. This is because at that time, there were very few undertakings so determined in the domain of pure, geometrical and minimalist form in Serbian and Vojvodinian art. Because of that, her exhibitions of paintings, collage and drawings in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, and in the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts in Novi Sad (1971), in the view of recent art criticism and art history (Denegri, Stepanov, Mladenov, Savčić, Arsić), were re-evaluated since it turned out that hitherto pieces by Mira Brtka were in the initial core of many subsequent phenomena, especially in art of the late 1980s and during the “discretely modernist” art of the 1990s.

The art of Mira Brtka flowed through in a course of continuity with many divergences on this route because the curious spirit of the artist was open to many creative challenges ranging from film and fashion, which intensively appealed to her for a while, to the research in the field of painting, collage, objects, installations, sculpture…

In the early 1990s, Mira Brtka began her sculpting activities. These sculptures, surely, had not classical look. The basic sculpture triad of material-mass-space are here taken to frontier area, to the testing of ultimate possibilities but also to the state in which sculpting being of the work is not annulled but it is rather confirmed in some of its different shape. These sculptures, although dedicated to existential topics and themes which are directly reminiscent of certain events, possess a humorous note. On several occasions (Novi Sad, Kulpin, Bratislava), these sculptures were exhibited in streets where their effect was extremely suggestive in an ambiental (the attractiveness of intensely coloured shapes), dialogical (the immediate encounter between passers-by and sculpture), and in an initial philosophical sense (because the encounter with these sculptures truly imposes numerous meditations and reflections upon manifestations of life).

The latest series of sculptures by Mira Brtka, created during the last two to three years, has a special meaning of its own. Namely, the character of these shapes clearly states the reminiscence of the monumentality of monumental sculptures used to mark or glorify ideological and political characteristics of the era of communism. The explicitness of such reminiscence is amplified by the fact that around the base of these sculptures, on the ground, a simple metal frame was installed. This is a thin, plain, geometrical metal edge which is painted in intensive red. This frame stresses the individuality of the sculpted piece and the characteristic red colour emphasizes its ideological tones. Simultaneously, the artist exhibits several other differently conceived sculptures in this exhibition, where she consciously displays the symbols of clear (political) characteristics and significations, such as the five- and six-point star, a flag, etc. Mira Brtka, therefore, essentially problematizes her sculptures and her expression while her forms possess certain political connotations. The intention of the artist is to criticize the issues of ideology, imposed ideological concepts and political systems, the obligations towards regime’s discipline, political totalitarianism, etc. All of this clearly states that Brtka, using an authentic plastic thought, manages to engender an engaged position and attitude towards vital manifestations of life.

In her current paintings, Mira Brtka remains faithful to geometrism, pure form, intensive flat colours and to problematizing the surface of the paintings. The artist in her mature years cares for the authenticity of a painting (the surface is only individuality of the painting that is not shared by any other visual system of art) which is based on the authentic modernist principles. However, pure form is not a purpose of its own – geometrism, rationalism, construction, an analytical approach to things and manifestations of life – all of this can be understood as a recipe that painting and all of Mira Brtka’s art has to offer in order to spiritually conquer a general feeling of an epochal crisis which has been part of our lives for the past two decades.

It is evident that Mira Brtka is an artist whose work manages to reach amazing heights. It is also the work which plays an active part in various domestic but also international currents. The list of her exhibitions is very rich and long. However, in this present moment, the art of Mira Brtka is a reliable witness of a current sensibility. This art is a reasonable interpreter of the world and time in which we live. This is the art on which present reviewers count, and which they include in many significant exhibitions and projects both here, at home, and abroad.