printmaker and teacher, was born in Hobart, son of a German refugee mother and Serbian refugee father. His father worked on the hydro-electricity scheme in Tasmania until he died when Milan was aged 9 or 10. Milan studied at the Tasmanian School of Art in 1972-75 (BA in printmaking) then was apprenticed as a master printer at Landfall Press, Chicago USA, with the support of a VACB grant 1977-79. In 1986 he was awarded a DAAD grant from Germany to document and research his family’s history. He was a tutor in printmaking at the Tasmanian School of Art (now TU) in 1986; head of printmaking in 1996.
Milojevic’s lithograph Red Dog/Waterhole won the Boyne Smelters Ltd Non Acquisitive Award for mixed media and printmaking in the 1993 Martin Hanson Memorial Art Awards at the Gladstone Regional Art Gallery and Museum (Qld), judged by Ian Howard (then Griffith Uni); he donated it to Gladstone AG. In 1993 he was awarded an Australian Council Development Grant and used it to return to work at Peacock Studios, Aberdeen ( Imprint 28/4, summer 1993, 14-15). He had fourteen solo exhibitions in 1984-96 and also made artist books, e.g. Fragment 1995 (10 prints based on images of a long-demolished hydro hut at Bronte Park, Tasmania, also used in Bronte Park II 1993, a cruciform-shaped screenprint on wood, copper, stainless steel and corrugated iron, 200 × 300 cm).
Many of his works are on the theme of post-war migration to Australia. Some use photographic images that relate to his parents’ experiences as refugees from Yugoslavia and Germany (see Kirker), including his first print, where he and his mother wear Groucho noses and specs, Portrait with Mother (some people say we look alike) , his 'Absorption/ Assimilation’ series of photo-lithographs of 1986-87 and An Affair in the Balkans 1991, a series of etchings with a drawn rather than photographic base, which are very dark. “I wanted them to look as though they had just come out of a smouldering fire – it’s that charcoal rawness that’s important. Images of war as depicted by Goya, Dix, Beckman, Kollwitz, personally touch the emotional strings a lot more” (Kirker interview, 22). His solo exhibition 'Burning Issues’ was held at Grahame Galleries and Editions, Brisbane, in November 1995.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
