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Milo Lazarevic
Milo Lazarevic
Born	(1942-08-14)14 August 1942 Kotor, Kingdom of Yugoslavia
Known for	Painting, sculpture, and eclectic works
Movement	Postmodernism
Awards	Columbia University Foreign Student Fellowship (1970), Pollock-Krasner Award for Sculpture (1985), Gottlieb Foundation Award (1997)

Milo Lazarevic is an American artist of Yugoslav descent, is a contemporary sculptor and painter of the postmodern experimental orientation. With a master of fine arts degree (1974), and later with PhD in art education (1977), he became a professor at Columbia University in the City of New York (1973–1978), and later a clinical professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York (1998–2014).

Biography

Early Life

Milo Lazarevic is an American author, educator, art historian, and artist born in Kotor, Yugoslavia (now Montenegro), during World War II, the second of five children. His father, Ivo John Lazarevich, was a respectable businessman who lived in Astoria, New York. His mother, Gordana Dajkovic, was born into an ecclesiastical family from the village of Drusici, near Cetinje. His parents separated when Milo was four years old. His father returned to New York, while his mother stayed to take care of the children.

Before the war, the Lazarevics were influential in the Bay of Kotor area. The Second World War, and especially the postwar period, tore apart the tightly knit family, whose property was seized by the new Communist authorities. Family members, under duress, scattered around the world, seeking safer places to live.

Lazarevic spent his early childhood in foster homes, frequently changing schools and places of residence. After finishing high school, he went to Belgrade, where he intended to study engineering, but he stayed there only a short time. His adventurous spirit and strong yearning for freedom took him on voyages across the seas. For eight years, he sailed ships under various banners; at sea, he had his first liaison with art. Finding discarded pieces of iron around the ships, he turned them into small sculptures that took on mostly architectural and animal forms. Only one of these sculptures survived and currently is located in Florida. The rest ended up at the bottom of various oceans.

“I am like a child who relentlessly seeks serious ideas in order to transform myself into a different, better person,” Lazarevic later wrote. “That is the expected magnitude of my existence thus far. During the first ten years of my childhood, I had indirect experiences with four of the most ruthless tyrants of the 20th century—Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Tito—who [transformed] my childish imagination into a unhospitable reality.”

Later Years

Lazarevic learned the practices of bronze casting, mold making, and metal fabricating at an industrial complex, A. Stotz AG, in Kornwestheim, West Germany (1965–1966). After 2 years residences in Germany, he went first to Canada, and then, a year later, to the United States, specifically New York City, where he attended art classes at Columbia University. In 1968, he was admitted as an art history student at the same university. At Columbia, he also studied philosophy, with Maxine Greene, and anthropology, with Margaret Mead.

In 1973, with his first solo exhibition at 14 Sculptors Gallery (New York), Lazarevic gained public attention as a distinguished researcher of matter and form. In his work, he delved into the essence of matter in order to bring out its distinctive meaning and effects. Acknowledged as a talented and innovative artist, he soon entered the circle of prominent sculptors and painters of the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. His sculptures and paintings have been exhibited at many group and solo exhibitions and have generated interest among art critics, prominent gallery owners, and the general public alike.

He became an American citizen in 1974. That year, he also defended his master’s thesis at Columbia University, Teachers College, where he had been hired as an adjunct professor.

In 1976, he went on a study trip to Yugoslavia, where he toured major Yugoslavian centers in order to obtain information about the role and significance of sculpture in that Marxist humanist society for his doctoral thesis. The following year, he defended his thesis and earned his doctorate at Columbia at Columbia Teachers College.

Teaching at Columbia University

Upon completion of his art education studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York, Lazarevic became an adjunct professor at the same university (1973–1978). His lecturing style encompassed multiple parallel areas, primarily relating to the domain of sculpture, but also including the history of art as well as the development of a new methodology and concepts designed to enhancing his students’ individual creativity. A major original initiative was the implementation of the Overseas Educational Program for Columbia’s Teachers College, in collaboration with Stagio Stagi Institute in Pietrasanta, Italy. He served as chairman of the program through 1978. In 1978, he relocated from the United States to France in order to attend lectures at Sorbonne University.

Teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

During his 17-year academic tenure at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (1998–2014), Lazarevic introduced innovative concepts into his teaching process. To his students, he dissected the nucleus of sculpture, painting, and art in general, and likened them to what he called “the essence of all existence.” He used humanistic approaches to bring the students closer to artistic comprehension and an acceptance of the world and their roles within it. Through his own methodology, Lazarevic used techniques and practical activities that encouraged his students to discover and develop their own talents.

Career Overview

While attending to his teaching responsibilities, Lazarevic relentlessly continued sculpting and painting. His sculptures, paintings, and eclectic works from that period were exhibited at prestigious galleries and museums in the United States and France.

Many significant art critics and art theorists wrote about Lazarevicʼs works of art in influential art journals, weekly magazines, and newspapers on two continents.

His work has been published in The New York Times, Art News, Arts Magazine, SoHo Weekly News, the Houston Chronicle, The Houston Post, Politica, The Journal News, Artes visuales, Belgrade Evening News, Belgrade Weekly News, and Belgrade Literary News, among others.

At various times, Lazarevic lived in Yugoslavia, Cuba, France, Spain, Germany, Canada, and Italy, and currently resides in New York, where he works and creates. His studio is located in Greene County on the west shore of the Hudson River. His artwork was inspired by his extensive travels to various countries on several continents, where he learned about exotic cultures, traditions, and customs of other peoples. He is fluent in English and Serbian and has a basic knowledge of Russian, German, and Italian.

Lazarevicʼs extensive artistic oeuvre encompasses numerous creative chapters, expressed in different media and techniques, from which three distinct art forms can be distinguished: sculptures, paintings, and eclectic works.

Sculptures

Ulysses (1988). Milo Lazarevic. Marble, 9' × 6' × 4.5' (275 × 183 × 137cm).

In his sculptures, Lazarevic aspires to the metaphysical principles of life, destiny, nature, the human spirit, and the universe as man’s point of origin but also as his finality. The sheer force of his sculptures raises unspoken questions about civilizations within the framework of not just historical times, but also vast archeological times. In most of his sculptures, questions concerning an individual’s existence in time and space and the search for permanent and universal truths beyond space-time reality are evident. Demands for quantity and quality of matter as a building material (stone, wood, iron, marble, etc.) are also obvious. His sculptures seem to step out of the framework of physical reality and enter the sphere of the peculiar and the monumental. Lazarevic’s arrangement of parts reduces sculpture to an elementary level of primitive shapes similar to organic, primal forms. In order to retain as intimate a contact with nature as possible, he makes concessions by loosely connecting the parts of his sculptures in order to give expression to each one. He thus avoids an outcome imposed by conventions, intellect, and the experiences of everyday life. Lazarevic builds a new sculptural unity—one deeply personal and intimate with his intuition.

Lazarevic reaches beyond the solidity of the materials that he uses for his sculptures to the creative power inherent in stone, marble, wood, metal, and bronze. He awakens that power and uses its force to create work that is genuine and freed from millennia of accumulated civilizational constraints. His sculpture delves into its inner self—its nucleus—from which shines raw strength. In that regard, its modernity is defined by its primitivism, anchored simultaneously in prehistory, the archaic, and the classical as well as in contemporary expression. In that way, his sculptures attain universal meaning and significance.

Pythia (2009). Milo Lazarevic. Bronze, 35" × 13" × 8" (69 × 43 × 20 cm).

Notable Works

• Hoodlum (2000)
• Equinox (2008)
• Pythia (2009)
• Contessa (2011)
• Appalachian (2016)

Paintings

What Words Don't Say (2019). Milo Lazarevic. Acrylic on canvas, 60" × 48" (152 × 122cm).

Lazarevic’s paintings employ shapes that have been simplified and reduced to their most elementary forms, accompanied by an overlay of unmixed colors and intertextual symbols such as letters, numbers, emblems, and so forth. Horizontal and vertical forces are portrayed using an aggressive style that appears to open up a visual field that goes beyond form. Regardless of their actual dimensions, his works give the impression of being monumental.

Lazarevic’s canvases derive their energy and strength from the primordial or from the unadulterated and purely intuitive approaches to the world, including the objects and phenomena found within both. By deconstructing learned and acquired knowledge, Lazarevic wipes out the entire artistic experience, the entire old world, and its iconography. He revolutionizes conventional feelings and opinions and starts from his own position zero, his own tabula rasa. Lazarevic eliminates the realistic plane from his paintings, regarding it as an illusion created through collective perception. Through the use of visual and sometimes nonvisual means, he builds another plane, threaded through multidimensional space. He depicts a new reality that evades rational cognition and is instead anchored in the metaphysical experience. Lazarevic wishes to return the art of painting to its essence, but not as its copied image, mimesis, model, or imprint, but as a new and humanized, parallel and independent world. He is convinced that only pure art – unburdened by historicism, tradition, customs, and habits – possesses the power to transform people’s lives, both practically and spiritually.

Notable Works

• Crossing the Delaware (2002)
• Go-between (2009)
• Kamikaze (2015)
• Tokyo Eloquence (2015)
• Tempest (2018)
• Sartre’s Cousin Jules (2018)
• Paradox Lost (2019)

Eclectic works

In creating his eclectic works, Lazarevic pays special attention to old, discarded objects that to him store historical remembrances of specific places. He uses corresponding symbols and traditional visual elements to contextualize their otherwise utilitarian purposes. Beginning with waste products of modern civilization collected on the street, in nature, or from antique and curio shops, Lazarevic then uses an eclectic process of pairing. By combining the objects with a painted visual template, he creates a structure that borders on sculpture, relief, and painting. Elevated to works of art, the objects allow the spectator to reimagine their meanings and communicate with them in an intimate manner.

Lazarevic places his objects in a new context as a way of creating an ironical/critical distance from the mechanism of consumption. In so doing, he relativizes truths from many eras of civilizational progress.

Lazarevic rejects the artistic past of the building elements of his objects, but he doesn’t deny it because he needs it as a witness. He starts from an initial position, highlighting the function of objects in the reshaping of man and circumstances in which an individual interacts with those objects. Lazarevic gradually leads an object into his work of art, almost humorously playing with it, to intimidate its original purpose, but also to envisage subsequent influence on human existence, which is implied and can be described as “artistic.” Thus, objects in his eclectic body of work are elevated to a higher artistic sphere that obliterate boundaries between people by setting an individual upon a new, cleansed and humanized plane of historical continuance.

Notable Works

• Trojan Horse (2005)
• Amish Clock (2012)
• Fool’s Errands (2012)
• Alleged Heroes (2013)
• Jannah (2016)

Books

• Intuitive Reality published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2021
• Brutalist Sculpture & Dystopia published by Pen & Publish in 2022.

Awards and Honors

• Columbia University, Foreign Student Fellowship, 1970.
• Pollock-Krasner Award for Sculpture, 1985.
• Gottlieb Foundation Award, 1997.

Exhibitions and Lectures

• First solo exhibition at Zigfield Gallery and the 14 Sculptors Gallery, 1973.
• Shows with The United Artist Group at the Union Carbide Building, New York City, 1974.
• One-man exhibition at the Yugoslav Cultural Center in New York City, 1974.
• One-man exhibition at the West Broadway Gallery, New York City, 1975
• Sculpture exhibits, United Nations and Yugoslav Culture Center, New York City, 1976.
• One-man exhibition at Covo de Yong Gallery, Houston, Texas, 1976.
• Exhibit with Artist 77 at the Union Carbide Building, New York City, 1977.
• Lectures on Sculpture at the College of New Rochelle, NY, 1978.
• One-man show at Sindin Galleries, New York City, 1979.
• One-man show at Galerie Marcel-Lenoir, Paris, 1979.
• One-man exhibition at Sindin Galleries, New York City, 1980.
• One-man exhibition of paintings and drawings at Gallerie Marcel-Lenoir, Paris, 1981.
• Exhibits at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC by invitation of the Vice President of the United States and his wife, Walter and Joan Mondale, 1982.
• One-man show at Sindin Galleries, New York City, 1982 and 1983.
• One-man show at O.K. Harris Gallery, New York City, 1985–1986.
• Exhibit of large oil paintings at the Blue Hill Cultural Center, Pearl River, NY, 1986.
• One-man Exhibitions at O.K. Harris Gallery, New York City, 1987/1990.
• One-man Exhibition at O.K. Harris Gallery, New York City, 1993.

References

Category:20th-century American painters Category:American male painters Category:Modern painters