Milovan DeStil Marković

Marković graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1986 but his spiritual and artistic formation essentially took place in the atmosphere of the Student Cultural Center Gallery in Belgrade where he had his first public appearances at the following exhibitions: New Space (1980), Fragments of Painting – Monument (1982), Black Space (1983), solo or, on several occasions, together with Victoria Vesna Bulajić, and through cooperation with Vlastimir Mikić with whom he joined forces in a the Tough Guys duo of authors which, by its basic creed and manner of behavior was in fact a continuation, although in different language forms, of a fundamental mentality of the new art of the 1970s.

Moving outside the ambiance of his initial formation, he took part in the October Salon in 1983 when he got an award, and then staged a solo exhibition entitled Eucharist in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 1985 which was awared by the jury of the Politika broadsheet. Acting from 1986 on out of Berlin, he participated in numerous exhibitions, installations, and video screenings at the domestic and international art scene, including, among others, solo exhibitions in Tübingen and Berlin in 1985 out of where he lived and acted since 1986. He also took part at the Aperto 86 exhibition at the Biennale in Venice in 1986. He stated his understanding of art in response to questions by Bojana Pejić, in an in interview for the Moment magazine (No. 3-4, 1986): “I treated everything as my work of art: from the public declaration of World Art Day (Art Monuments), to organizing rock concerts, and forming the Tough Guys group,vbut also opening the Club at the Academy of Fine Arts (FLU), writing for newspapers, organizing many parties, solo and group video performances“. And further on: “In fact, for me, art is the highest possible level of consciousness, spirit, thought, and word of a man. Or better put: a work of art is a product of this consciousness. It is not important in what shape or medium this work will be realized of presented“. Consistent with this general understanding, his works, achieved through various painterly methods, even when they they have the look of a painting as a standard gallery exhibit, they are in fact individual components of an integral artistic concept in which various spectrum, ranging from references to models of long-gone epochs to the application of contemporary mass media, merge together.