On Tuesday, April 15, starting at 7 p.m., Salon 77 will host the opening of a solo exhibition by Mila Gvardiol, an artist from Belgrade. The exhibition features paintings from her latest production, which belong to the “Interactions” cycle.
Mila Gvardiol (Belgrade, 1979) graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts (2004) and received her doctorate from the Interdisciplinary Studies Department of the University of Arts in Belgrade (2012). She is an associate professor and dean at the Faculty of Digital Production in Sremska Kamenica. She taught at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade from 2015 to 2023. She has held more than 40 solo exhibitions in many cities in Serbia and Croatia. She has exhibited at over 200 collective exhibitions in the country and abroad. She has won 15 awards, including the ULUPUDS Annual Award (2018).
The thoughtful and intellectualized transformation of the scene from the macrocosm into the language of geometric forms and lines with a sensitive coloristic choice is the basis of Mila Guardiola’s painting manuscript, while the original motif inspiration is recognized in the architecture of urban environments. The artist sublimates fragments of architecture to the level of basic geometric bodies and forms, neglecting the primary function of architecture and creating works that are abstract in terms of visuality and semantic ambiguity with emotional, psychological, or existential connotations.
Mila Guardiola’s latest paintings from the “Interactions” series are dominated by massive cubes that resemble apartment buildings, but they are offset from their axis, slanted, disturbingly tilted, prone to falling. The artist mainly presents them from a lower angle, so that their tops are concentrated around a central whiteness as a light source, or the light source is displaced outside the canvas and illuminates the scene in the form of a prismatic beam. By varying the compositional approach, the way of treating light, and the color scheme (from darker, monochrome to lighter pastel), the artist artistically defines different states of interaction, which results in a variety of general impressions that range from the extreme drama of a high energy charge to the tranquility of the coexistence of subdued energy.
The exhibition of Mila Guardiola in Niš will last until May 6th.