Miško Šuvaković

European Contexts of the 20^th-Century Art in Vojvodina

The Limits of Modernity or the Case of Mira Brtka

Mira Brtka was born in Novi Banovci. She graduated in film directing from the Academy of Stage and Film Art in Belgrade in 1953, and from the Academy of Fina Arts (Accademia di Belle Arti) in Rome in 1963. She directed a play, Glass Menagerie, in Subotica in 1953. She studied in Prague, working with filmmaker Otakar Vávra. She made short films for Zagreb Film until 1959. She worked as a scenographer in The Steppe (1963) and Soloist (1963), and, as an assistant director to Pietro Germi, she worked on The Facts of Murder (1959) in Italy. She was also the script supervisor in Sutjeska the movie (1970-1971).

She started an intensive engagement in painting during her stay in Rome, where she had a solo exhibition in 1964. She took part in several group exhibitions, of which Forme presenti in 1965 was the most important. At the Vojvodina and Serbian art scenes, she appeared with exhibitions in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad, and Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, in 1971. She was a member of the Illumination international art group, formed in 1967 by a Japanese artist Nobuya Abe (1913-1971). Members of that group were Milena Čubraković (1924-2004), American artist Marcia Hafif, and two Italian artists – Paolo Patelli and Aldo Schmid. The group did not have a declarative working program but all of its members were connected through a congenial understanding of art as a completely non-referential abstraction, more of organic and meditative than strictly geometric and constructive characteristics. In early works by Brtka, which have Italian names, which means that they were created and resemble the artistic life of that surroundings, according to critic Ješa Denegri, one can notice a gradual separation from the heritage of informalism whose last traces are visible in soft relief layers of material on the painting, so that they could become, after that, a completely plastic organism, mostly in white, moving towards minimalization of the form and then minimalization in radical stadium, which is not attained in the end because an extreme understanding of picture did not suit its formation and nature. Namely, in the spirit of ideas preached by Abe, and which were, essentially, accepted by his younger assistants, a picture, although deprived of every reference to objects, and reduced to the simple and summarized visual effects, is not an aesthetic creation but it is rather created and should look as a sign of spiritual “illumination” in the tradition of Asian life philosophies. After the Illumination group ceased to work, Brtka continued her individual work as a painter and sculpture together with her other artistic interest. She also applied herself to a kind of symbiosis of the principle of organic and geometric abstraction of exceptionally active colour whose coloured zones were separated by hard edges, building a type of a painting from the River “A” (1970) series or ALLI (1970) in the spirit of basic plastic postulates of painterly culture of late modernism.

Mira Brtka made several series of sculptures, at the turn of the 20^th century and in the beginning of the 21^st century such as Outside-Inside (1999), Readymade (2000) or Red Sculpture (2005-2006). Most of these sculptures were created with the “adoption” of, “rearrangement” of, and “renaming” of ready-made semi-products or prefab elements. Readymade concept was not established on an explicit Duchampian (Marcel Duchamp) way but in the way the readymade conception was integrated in “new sculpture” practices of the 1980s and early 1990s. This is about the works of simple objective configuration which enter the procedure of conceptual sculptural performances. These works could “in other words” be labelled as the effect of a performance and body watching/looking in sculptural performances. The sculptress in the Red Sculpture series rearranges and uses metal semi-products (processed, welded pieces of metal) and puts them on a pedestal, which gets the “look” of a monumental sculpture. These “cynical sculptures” are being offered as some undefined and arbitrary “swept away trace” of monumental sculptures from the era of socialist modernism. Their character of a trace of socialism is enhanced through the use red metal frame around the pedestal and the sculpture. The paradox of these works is that they suggest the cynical relationship towards the falsehood of socialist modernism, and, on the other side, some melancholic, almost tender relationship towards the artefacts of labour and symbolization of past utopian societies.