Miodrag Šćepanović
SCULPTURES

MIOORAG ŠĆEPANOVIĆ, Montenegrin sculptor, born on 21 October 1953 in Kolašin. In 1983, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade (Department of Sculpture, Prof. Miso Popovic).
Member of Montenegro Fine Artist Association since 1990.
Address: Selišta 81250 Kolašin
tel: 081 864 581, 069 221677




"While sculpturing in stone, both the spirit and features of the material are
revealed before you. It is your hand that thinks and obeys the thought of
the material itself". (Brancusi)



Miodrag Scepanovic, Montenegrin sculptor of an extremely profound artistic sensibility, has succeeded in projecting in his creative work pervaded with lyric notes, his own humanistic standpoint as his basic principie, grounding it on the ethics of eternal innocence and close relatedness between Man and Nature. Like Неnrу Moore who has said once that among a million of rounded stones he passes by while walking along a seashore, he notices with exaltation solely those that respond to his interest in form at that particular moment, Scepanovic has also selected those of such a shape, size and chromatic features that animate rapturously his sensual and imaginative sensations. Respecting, a priori, the power of the material itself - stone, as well as proceeding from intellectual and emotional inspirations of his own, and dedicating himself to a classical ideal of beauty rendered primarily in the manner of form treatment, the sculptor has created pieces of art that with its vitality and aesthetical values reflect the postulates of modemistic sculpturing.

It is a crude substance endowed with bipolarity of that primordial perfection, extracted from Nature itself - the river of Svinjaca abundant in volcanic rocks of the most varied colors, that through artificial interventions has been finely enriched with some new features.



Formats of chamber dimensions and a repertoire of restricted motives are being born from stone, dominated like in Risto Stijovic's creations by figures of women - either an introverted individual or a mother embracing her child, as well as the animal world. In stylized, idealized forms liberated of all extrinsic details, the sculptor has emphasized solely the most essential characteristics. Discretely distinguished out of the compact mass of a pure volume are organic shapes, whereas the figures are reduced to some conjured forms restrained within their world of magic. Their countenances are transformed into an amorphous mass concealed behind of which is the figure of a muse, a goddess, a heroine from some ancient times or even a petrified, emotionless masque, with their eyes executed as fissures-cuts that allude to a glance occupied with internal, virtual rhythms.These are multi-profiled sculptures that sometimes appear as the symbiosis of a perfect cameo profile and a slightly facetted en face resembling to those of early Cubism works (Portrait of a Woman). Forms emerge as if by some action of the growing еnеrgу from within the stone that is being converted at the surface into vibrant, wavering surfaces, creating a harmonic piece of art of the realistic-associative procede.



There is no meaning of symbolic or metaphorlc mysteriousness imparted to his sculptures. What they are so closely related to is that mystery of life in its original, existential sense.

It is the јоу of creation that lavishes our attention in his pieces of art, that virtuoso craftsmanship and subtlety in the treatment of the sculptural mass and form. It is the sculptor's hand that softens stone and alters its features having been naturally endowed with by Nature. Traces, as of veins and rings, created in the morphological composition of pebbles by the action of time and water -the traces of permanence and eternity, have imprinted an archetypic matrix into Scepanovic's sculptural creations. Proceeding from the ab antiquo prlnciple and his own idea of immovability, he has rendered that natural integrity of an autonomous, gracious and subtle form in space througha precisely defined threedimensional corpus.



Nevertheless, it is by means of rhythmic cadences of forrnal elements that he has succeeded in manifesting the movement of some internal swaying reflected and developed at the surface of a plastic and structural stratification.
The surface, elaborately polished and glossy, glittering of light into shadovvs and of shadows into light - the sculptural sfumato, delicacy of linear cadences, all these help creating a piece of art that reflects aesthetical and creative characteristics of the Moderna. The impressionistic treatment of substance has been achieved through such a refined interplay of concaved surfaces, convexes, carved wrinkles, while the richness of synchronous glittering of light and color imparts some musical features to the substance.
The glassy facture and an imaginary line of vitality finding its way through the stone form and outlining contours in space, have created ipso facto symphonically harmonious wholes that emanate sensual articulations being transferred to the viewer by tactile and visual sensations.



Sculptures carved in wood and displayed at this show as works of retrospective character, thanks to their both visual and linguistic, as well as aesthetical values, represent together with masterpieces of stone sculptures, a unique and artifkially poetic texture. If we just ponder the assurnption that man is always in the pursuit of an ideal that is grounded on universal harmonies, Miodrag Scepanovic's sculptural pieces of art could be associated then with the Pygmalion's absolute and the artist's power to bestow a vital germ upon nonliving substances, as well as with the rnythic belief that stone is alive and that it gives life.
lconic anthropomorphic and animalistic forms are given such a masterly touch and here it is, coming to life - an idealized, sensual world of sculptural forms that through the perfection of natural shapes make us aware that aesthetical ideals of beauty are as eternal as Man himself.