Despard Gallery is proud to announce a significant upcoming solo exhibition, Once Was / Is : Revisiting The Archive by established Tasmanian artist Milan Milojevic.
For his second major exhibition with Despard Gallery, Milojevic presents a new suite of his distinctive digital prints, alongside some important historical pieces. This includes three large scale etching and aquatint works created in the mid 1990’s during an artist residency in Scotland, the last edition available. The exhibition aims to share some major turning points of Milojevic’s practice, showcasing key influences and developments of what has become a nationally recognised artistic career.
Credited as a principal figure in the development and adoption of digital processes within contemporary printmaking, Milojevic’s influence on the national printmaking scene is undeniable. With a highly distinctive aesthetic, his practice has continuously merged both contemporary and historical influences, including digitally layered compositions brought to life through archival inkjet prints overlaid with traditional printmaking techniques. Punctuated by vibrant colour, each work depicts strange, collaged worlds, populated with altered symbols of native flora, fauna alongside mythical beings, echoing the diagrammatic illustrations from woodblock prints of 16th Century Europe. From these fictitious records, Milojevic critiques the ‘Age of Discovery’ where European explorers raced in the conquest of strange new worlds, capturing and cataloguing a treasury of exotic specimens. Captured within these zoological records is a sense of wonder and fascination, driven in part by a sense of discovery and witness to something truly bizarre. But it is also found within the science of taxonomy and a human desire to classify and systematise in an attempt to make sense of the world.