Art from the creatures of nature

"For years traveling around Montenegro and other regions, I got to know the beauty, richness and complexity of nature, trying to express what I felt in my own way. I visited museums and galleries around the world, studied Giacometti, Brancusi and Moore, Etruscan and African art and classical sculpture, but I always came to the conclusion that I can only express myself in the right way the way I feel. Then a person works with will and does not feel the burden", says Mijo Mijušković, a great Montenegrin sculptor.

At the opening of Mijušković's exhibition in the Dado Gallery (curators and installation: Miloš Marjanović and Slobodan Vušurović), Dr. Anastazija Miranović, art historian and author of the text in the Catalogue, academician Pavle Pejović, director of the Museum, and Dr. Ratko Božović, sociologist of culture, spoke.

"...Mijo Mijušković is the poet of the "stone sky" of Montenegro. His thoughts pile up like clouds, heavy and dark... but also airy-transparent, strange, sincere beauty... In the sculptures of Mijo Mijušković, we feel the dichotomy of nature's being - fragile, porous, impermanent-unreal, and an equally intimate solidity, staunch determination , warm-cold tactility, dramatic-lyrical poetics, just as the artist himself is woven from the softest sensitive material and that diamond hardness, stubborn persistence and passionate ferocity of creation..." (Miranović)

"...Back in 1973, when I started my studies, I met Mijo Mijušković, whom I had heard earlier that somewhere at the meteorological station in Nikšić, there was a special person who sculpts sculptures all day long and only stops working when he sends reports to the meteorological center in Podgorica. When I got there, Mijo appeared, white from a cloud of stone dust, and then, from that cloud, sculptures of an unusual shape appeared, some of which are also in this exhibition.

Due to his dedication to work and creativity, he was and remains an apostle of sculpture.

It is an honor and pleasure for me to be part of the team that worked on the project of his exhibition, which deservedly came to the space named after his friend Dad Đurić..." (Pejović)

"...Through Mij's art, we learn that stone has both a mask as its exterior, but also its mysterious hiddenness as a world of refined harmony. There is an unexpected celebration of colors, the kind of which, in such shades, can rarely be seen anywhere... Mijo Mijušković is a great artist also because he is constantly in the creative age..." (Božović)

FROM THE BIOGRAPHY

Sculptor Mijo Mijušković was born in 1931 in Montenegro. He lived and created in Cetinje, Podgorica, Nikšić. Now he lives and works in Sutomor near Bar (Suvi Potok).

He had over forty solo and several collective exhibitions in the former Yugoslavia and abroad. Numerous awards are rounded off by the national Thirteenth of July Lifetime Achievement Award.

After training as a meteorologist, as a nineteen-year-old he came to Cetinje where, along with organizing the meteorological service, he got to know the city and socialized with important personalities and, as he says, "exceptional people".

In the Catalog under the title "MY CETINJE", among other things, it is written: "I came to Cetinje in 1950. A town with two streets, Njegoševa and Bajova. Later I will understand that those two names symbolize what the City was founded on and sustained - on the wisdom and work of Njegoš and on the heroism of Baja Pivljanin. When I first went out on the street, I met Ranko Đurić, in the "Lovac" club, below the Jovićević house, where I lived. Thus, along with my first vineyard, I meet a classy man, and soon his entire family, with whom I became very close...

I have to single out three women, emotional, loyal and strong: Milka Jovićević, Ljubica Živković and Ikana Tomašević.

I meet a gallery of good and creative people, such as: Marko Borozan, Leso Ivanović, Gojko Berkuljan, Bane Bastać, Đoko Žigalj, Milo Božović, Dado and Puro Đurić.

I would like to mention Simo Cuca who promised Ranko Đurić that he would come to his funeral, and on the day of the funeral he told me "I don't hear, I don't see. Better, I can't see, I can't hear." And I had the opportunity to hear shouts of "Tito, Blažo, Tito, Blažo!" during a rally in the fifties, in front of the Belvedere, and to my astonishment, a teacher exclaims: "Very important, very important!"

Finally, two famous characters from the street, Branko Kićin and Branko "Crazy". The first one had a car and, when he wanted to transport something, he would charge fifty dinars, and I once gave him one hundred dinars, to which he protested, thinking that it was less than the amount he asked for. Branko "Ludog" was taken to a psychiatrist and during the test he was given a bottomless barrel and a bucket with water to fill the barrel. Branko approached the psychiatrist and told him: "Godfather, fill it halfway, and I'll fill the other half..."

In the end, my idea came true that, while the smell of linden in Njegoševa street was intense, Žarko Laušević, who was my friend and neighbor, was speaking the lyrics of the song Kari Šabanova along the street, which represented my symbolic "parting" with Cetinje .

In Nikšić, Mijo continues to work as a meteorologist, and participates in the construction of a special observatory. There he developed his artistic work to the highest level, and later continued in Sutomore.

Let's go back to meteorology, because it is from this element of Nature that Mijo gets energy and fuels creativity.

The formation of Mijo Mijušković as a sculptor was influenced by two great world meteorologists: Toro Beržeran and Pavle Vujović, who revealed to him the closeness of artistic creation and his professional vocation. In that connection, probably, after a multi-millennium stay in the country, the Meteorite stone came to him, whose message he read in the Mijo sculpture in his own way.

The connection between art and science will lead Mijo to the work of Milutin Milanković, in whose honor he continues to create a series of stone sculptures.

MIJ'S WORK IN THE EYES OF ANALYSTS

Mij's art attracts a lot of attention from a wide intellectual public: art aestheticians, writers, personalities from the sphere of science. By this and by high value judgments, he belongs to the narrowest circle of Montenegrin visual artists of the twentieth century. Here are some excerpts from the texts of the Catalog.

"... Almost all of Mij's sculptures are essentially formally abstract categories, in the power of one single idea and one single desire: how to reveal the mystical, pagan metaphysical dimension of one of the most enduring materials in the world - stone..." (Sreto Bošnjak).

"...Mijo shows the way to the truly modern through the primitive. When a distant association approaches one Gabo, Arp, Brankuši, or Mur, it only means that there are great artists in this century who were and remain on the trail of the same essences..." (Siniša Vuković).

"...Mijo in flint develops his sonata in the glory of God..." (Mirko Kovač).

"...According to the layers he identifies in a rock or stone, Mijušković exposes the deepest archetypal layers, aiming at an anthropomorphic experience of the forms of nature/physis in which pain, fear, melancholy, eros, joy or force are contained..." (Siniša Jelušić ).

"...The great rhythm of nature, with which Mijo's artistic being pulsates, has a subtle interpretation in the dramatic symbiosis of bushes and stone, in the roots that died tied to the "veins to the stone". There he found beings "that never truly lived in our eyes"..." (Mladen Lompar).

"... As if in some convulsion of love or hatred, stone and wood are bound together once and for all in unusual "collages" and act no longer as a game, but as a drama of our entire life... A tree that captures with its "guts" the stone can be/is a metaphor for the mother's existential anxieties and anxieties, although most often it is an artistic search for archetypal forms. (S. Vušurović).

"...Mijo, like Antej, finds his strength in the fracture of karst, storms, snows, endless sky, holy from the beginning..." (Radoslav Josimović).

"...Close relations with the earth allowed Mio a wide range of interpretations of the life of the stones, which shows that he thoroughly knew their speech and read their anthropomorphic tendencies. And the desire to discover spirituality in a form understandable to man..." (Henrih Jurkovski).

The editor of the well-known magazine "Nacional geografic" chose Voj Stanić and Mijo Mijušković among Montenegrin visual artists.

Real insight only when a comprehensive monograph is made

Anyone who has met Mija at least once knows his great need for conversation.

The story is very complex and branched like a river with numerous tributaries and backwaters, and so on until the delta turns into the sea.

You can't expect from Mio, but if someone managed to transfer from the audio tape to a book, what multi-volume novels with poignant content would be.

The exhibition in Cetinje includes enough representative works by Mij, mostly selected from the Gallery Suvi potok in Sutomor. How many are there still in Belgrade, Subotica and in numerous galleries and private collections...

A more complete insight into his work will only be possible if conditions are met to print a comprehensive monograph on the art of Mijo Mijušković.

(Prepared by Pero Radović, TV author and publicist)

Gallery