Milutin Gubash

Milutin Gubash’s practice is multidisciplinary. He plays with narrative codes of video, sculpture, photography as much as performance.Gubash does not hesitate to alter a fact in order to make the underlying reality of his subjects and themes more credible, understandable. The artist exacerbates the issues of memory by deploying a set of family stories that constantly intertwine facts and fiction, past and present, idealization and historical acuity, building over time a real, serious and amazing saga. Having immigrated to Canada as a young child, Gubash has continued to build a relationship with his native country, through his parents’ stories of their life in Serbia, intensive research, and his own imaginings to fill in the gaps.

With humor and intelligence, the artist addresses ideas of authenticity and perceptions of cultural, political and social identities. He highlights the contradictions of our capacity to construct a sense of identity whether it is through his large scale black and white photographs of Monuments to Communists, his “lamps-sculptures” created in collaboration with his family still in Serbia or through the episodes of the DIY sitcom soap-opera reality show Born Rich Getting Poorer, which predicted by a couple of years our current selfie-driven culture of continuously updated autobiographical constructions.

 

Biography

Milutin Gubash was born in Novi Sad, Serbia, and now lives and works in Montréal, Canada. His work has been widely exhibited throughout Canada, United States and Europe since 2000, including solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Alberta and Muzej Vojvodina in Serbia among others. His video work has been shown in France, Germany, Spain, England and Mexico. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Ontario, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. He was artist in residence at Fonderie Darling in the Montreal Studios from 2009 to 2012.

Recent exhibitions

2022-2023	Some Birds, multiscreen video wall,  Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Place des Arts commissioned, Montréal, CA
2018-2020	Lamps, 1000 Years, and The Magician’s Hand in the Cold Light of Day, solo exhibition, Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Saint-Jérôme, CA
2013	In Union, Fonderie Darling, Montreal, CA