MILAN MRKUSICH
b. 1925, New ZealandMilan Mrkusich is a pioneer New Zealand abstract painter. His earliest paintings were influenced by the Bauhaus, the De Stijl movement and late works by Mondrian. Mrkusich’s work was included in the Auckland City Art Gallery’s exhibition, Object and Image (1954). His Emblems and Elements series (1963-65), were inspired by C.G. Jung’s Man and his Symbols, featuring geometric forms on painterly canvases.
By the 1970s, his work had become increasingly minimalist in content, with pure stained canvases drawing attention to the picture’s surface, and space as its subject. By the early 1980s, tilted, rectangular canvases, featuring geometric arches and segments, established a complex aesthetic harmony.
Mrkusich was made an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1997 and he has works in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery, Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington and many other major public and private collections in New Zealand.
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