In this show, Miroslav Antic continues to explore the power of memory by transforming personal photographs of his family, friends and youth while growing up in Belgrade into seductive canvases veiled by semi-transparent layers of colorful stripes, polka-dots and even Pollock-like paint splatters.

Antic’s paintings draw in the viewer’s gaze with his reflections of a family album. At first view, these paintings carry the feeling of nostalgia and one can not help but relate the artist’s imagery to ones own retrospection of their family history. In this way Antic’s paintings are highly intimate and personal, yet universal and inclusive. Each painting draws in the viewer, past the surface of the canvas. But Antic’s suspended layers of paint hover over the picture plane and filter ones vision, inserting distance between the viewer and the image that lies beneath.

Much like Pop Art painters Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Antic uses appropriated imagery, in this case from his own personal photo archives, and contemporizes them. In the work Untitled (Father, 1939) 2006, the artist renders a photographic image of his father in a bathing suit circa 1939. The image suggests a moment from another era, but Antic has provocatively painted a layer over the image of poppy polka-dots and water droplets which call attention to the two-dimensionality of the flattened canvas. In another painting, Untitled (First Grade) 2005, the artist paints over the figurative image a yellow transparent layer accompanied by bright stripes of color, suggesting that memories can be just as fictive and hazy as these paintings themselves.

January 11 – February 17, 2006