Description
About the artist Milena Pavlović Barili
Milena Pavlović Barili (Požarevac, 1909 – New York, 1945) graduated from the Royal School
of Arts in Belgrade and continued her education in Munich (at the Blocherer School, Heinrich
Knirr’s school, and the Academy of Fine Arts). She lived, worked, and exhibited her work in
Paris, London, Rome, and Florence, before settling and dying in New York. Her artistic
expression, closely related to post-surrealist and metaphysical painting, is characterised
by a high degree of originality and imagination. She expressed her artistic strivings in
poetry as well. In New York, she worked in design, fashion illustration, and costume design.
About the Self-portrait, 1938
The painting of Milena Pavlović Barili went through several phases, but its main stylistic traits
remained surrealism and metaphysical painting, endowed with an original and unique figural
and thematic sensibility. With her poetical procedure of combining elements typically borrowed
from the world of dreams, antiquity, and mystique, she created works that invite us to read the
symbolical meanings of her representations.
She typically painted figures from her own surroundings, often in duplicate; for the most part,
these included her own likeness in repetition – self-portraits, notably this Self-portrait
(Autoportret, 1938), focused on the expressivity of her large dark eyes, her elongated nose
and attractive lips, wherein we may recognise the meaning of an alter ego, a play of light
and darkness, revealing and concealing, as well as her calm gaze fixed on the viewer.
