Radenko Milak Bosnian, b. 1980

Radenko Milak (b.1980 Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina) uses the mirror of painting to explore the major questions and upheavals of our time. Madison Gallery is proud to present the individual exhibition  “ Angel of History”, featuring new large and small format works. Milak came to international fame in 2017 through ‘University of Disaster’, his artistic submission for the Bosnia and Herzegovina pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Since then, His works have been found in important public collections, most recently the Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, Croatia), at Marta Herford (Herford, Germany) and the Folkwang Museum (Essen, Germany), the Albertina Museum in Vienna and The Ludwig Museum in Budapest.

Radenko Milak’s focus is on the relationship with reality and history through the transformation of photographs into paintings. He translates press photos from printed media and the internet into meticulously detailed watercolors in soft black-and-white tones creating intimate pictorial references to current events. By consciously translating these images from one medium to another, he reinforces the message of the original image. This process allows him to transfer these messages from the past to the present, stimulating the viewer to re-evaluate forgotten and invisible realities. As such, topics like major world catastrophes, wars, global environmental crises.

His newest body of work primarily addresses the two major crises that the world is dealing with: the environmental crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The socially and politically committed Milak puts these two crises into perspective, while simultaneously juxtaposing them and connecting them to each other, creating thought-provoking, dynamic watercolors. Milak invites the viewer to think about the issues at hand and sparks debate, for example by questioning the way governments worldwide reacted to the COVID-19 threat compared to the threat of climate change, and in suggesting that there is no longer room for national politics in a globalized world.