NOW LAUNCHING DURING MEXICO CITY ART WEEK

Putiputi Konukura, 2024, sculpture.
SIZE: 28 x 15 x 11.5 cm / 11.02 in x 5.91 in x 4.53 in (sculpture including plinth)
MATERIAL: Resin core finished with copper gilding & the granite stone plinth
PRICE: US $ 7,900

PUTIPUTI KONUKURA, is a scultpure my Misha Milovanovich, from a new body of work started in 2024.

Artist Statement: "In the midst of these turbulent times, my work finds new life by reclaiming neglected land—revitalizing it with vibrant plants and flowers, cultivating vegetables, and sharing the harvest with low-income families. This work is deeply tied to my Serbian heritage, where farming and natural medicine are intertwined cultural practices. The sculptures that emerge from this process are not imposed upon the landscape, but rather arise from it organically, blurring the boundaries between art-making, labor, and the socio-environmental context in which they exist. Through this action, I seek to explore the intersection of feminism, spirituality, materiality, heritage, and the role of art as a form of activism."

Drawing on the Māori term "konukura" (copper) and the cultural symbolism of putiputi (flower), Milovanovich crafts a work that bridges her Serbian heritage with a global language of interconnectedness. Rooted in her practice of land stewardship—reclaiming neglected land, nurturing it with plants, flowers, and vegetables, and sharing the harvest with the wider community—the sculpture becomes a nexus of ecological, cultural, and spiritual meaning. Putiputi Konukura resists the conventional imposition of art upon its environment. Instead, it arises organically from the rhythms of labor and care embedded in Milovanovich’s practice.

ABOUT

Misha Milovanovich is a Belgrade-born artist living and working in London for the past 30 years. Misha works across several mediums, from sculpture to painting and live art. Characterised by vivid colour, optical movement and energetic visual cadences, her visual work fuses a diverse repertoire of images and forms. She often features discarded shards of consumerism - unloved icons of disposability and careless consumption.

Misha's work is often a symphonic abstraction. Her colourful, densely layered works are held in a state of tension between order and chaos, rational structure and spontaneity. She combines depth and surface relief, orchestrating bold contrasts of form, texture and space in her pictures. An intimate colour palette of bodily fluids - red, pink, white, black, yellow and brown - animate the writhing forms and the refracted memories of cartoonish cultural production.

A cultural polymath, Misha is constantly engaged in observing society and it’s distortions of desire, lust and attitudes to the body. Traditional techniques have been studied and absorbed and although her work is partly conceptual, it's execution always reflects these hard won technical abilities. Misha's main subject matter is emotion, so naturally her work is highly personal and biographical in ways that create a direct, emotional response from the viewer. Empathy and the universals of human experience - passion, nostalgia, desire and disgust are inescapable in her work.

Misha is herself a ‘displaced’ person, having left Serbia for London in her late teens she still carries within her a ‘stranger’s perspective’ and perceives the world as an outsider, someone ever alert to the non-verbal subtleties of communication. Her artistic progenitors include her mentor Martin Kippenberger, Wassily Kandinsky  and Phillip Guston as well as contemporary artists Gilbert and George, Keith Tyson, Robert Pruitt and Jim Lambie.

WOODEN SCULPTURES

CERAMICS

This is a sculpture series Misha Milovanovitch did together with Gunther Rohde, in 2019

MISHA’s work is always spirited, humorous and bursting with delight.. Her totemic sculptures reflect a joyful kind of appropriation and reference-making. Characterised by a profusion of exuberant colors and shapes Misha blurs boundaries, between abstraction and figuration, painting and sculpture, flatness and solidity, form and theory, revelling in the fertile soil between opposites. In her most recent work Misha’s unique aesthetic absorbs influences that ancient and mythological. These are anthropomorphic creations that exude warmth and humour and honour Miro, Picasso, Louise Bourgeois and Noguchi. Her work relates to our connection with the natural world, offering a tactile optimism in the face of digital absurdity. Everything connects to her biography - lived experiences, learned technique, jokes, memories and eulogies. Her latest work is a collaboration with Gunter Rhoder, her trusted friend and accomplice.