Award winning artist Mladen Miljanović holds 1st solo exhibition in the UK

NN Contemporary Art is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in the UK by Mladen Miljanović. The exhibition brings together a number of his recent artworks including the eponymous Garden of Delights.

This central piece contains more than one hundred tombstone motifs found and collected in the Central Balkans and engraved onto a triptych of granite slabs mounted on a metal frame. Before enrolling at the Academy of Arts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Miljanović worked engraving tombstones. These motifs were chosen as illustrations of their indulgences and because they wish to see them immortalised by means of the realistic, a practice that became popular during the rise of kitsch and turbo-folk culture in the 1980-1990s.

Referencing Hieronymus Bosch's Renaissance painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, the form of the image of a personal indulgence becomes an expression of the collective absurd and discord. For Miljanović the graveyard is an area storing an encyclopaedia of images of individual lives joined to form a garden of a collective eternity.

About the exhibition

Mladen Miljanović
The Garden of Delights
4 October—7 December 2014
NN, Number Nine Guildhall Road, Northampton NN1 1DP

Opening night: 3 October 2014, 6pm

About the artist

Mladen Miljanović was born in Zenica in 1981 and completed secondary school in Doboj. After secondary school he attended the Reserve Officer School where he earned the rank of sergeant, in which he went on to train 30 privates. After completion of the military term he enrolled at the Academy of Arts (Department of Painting, BA–MA) in Banja Luka and continues to live and work in Banja Luka.

Miljanović has exhibited internationally with solo and group exhibitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, USA, Italy, Germany, Austria, France, Serbia, The Netherlands, South Korea and represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. 

About NN Contemporary Art

NN is a contemporary art space in the centre of Northampton. This project is part of NN's Northampton Multiverse series of exhibitions exploring different artist's worlds. A series of events will accompany this exhibition. For further information about the project and NN visit: www.nncontemporaryart.org

Opening times:
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm
Sunday 2pm–5pm
Free admission

NN is supported by:
Arts Council England
Northampton Borough Council
Northampton County Council
University of Northampton