Dragomir Misina

Dragomir Misina

Bath, BANES, United Kingdom

About Dragomir Misina

Dragomir is a Croatian born artist. He graduated with a First in Fine Art Painting from Bath School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University. Dragomir is based in Bath, UK, and works from his studio in town at 44AD artspace. "I use the process of painting to document physical and psychological presence, investigating the communicative function of colour and form as a reaction. The starting point of each painting is based on some form of narrative, which inevitably informs the course of painting. However, in the process of painting, it is not a question of making ever more references to the narrative, but a deliberate attempt to escape from it. Therefore the paintings may be observed for what they are rather than what they should mean."

Education:

BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting at Bath School of Art & Design, Bath Spa University 2009 - 2012

Events:

Published interview in the Evolver Wessex art and culture magazine

Dragomir Mišina is a painter whose exuberant, vibrant swirls of pigment, looping thin lines and hastily scribbled text proclaim an artist for whom improvisation is a way of life. As a child, growing up in Croatia, he was always making things: toys, basketball hoops, tricycles out of scrap metal, getting help from older friends with welding equipment. Given his passion for manipulating materials it is perhaps surprising that he has ended up painting rather than making sculpture. However his work has a strong sense of structure and his working method, layering, building up and breaking down surfaces and texture are akin to sculptural processes despite their application on a two-dimensional surface.

Arriving in the UK in 1989 he initially studied photography but his yearning for a more physical and immediate approach to expressing his ideas moved him towards painting. His work is abstract though based on the visual. Things seen in his day-to-day life, signs, objects, popular culture but also fairy stories and children’s books like Alice in Wonderland. He will take a visual idea, an element of a story and use this as a starting point for one of his large paintings. However once the repetitive processes of applying paint, allowing it to dry, sanding and contemplating it, have begun, the narrative of the painting becomes self-referential, responding to the marks, materials, colours and the element of chance associated with the process of deliberate destruction.

Dragomir’s working method and his materials: acrylic, coloured pencil, graphite, permanent markers, are closely aligned to the subject of his paintings. When working on ideas of decay he built elements of decay into the work in progress. In his Alice in Wonderland series it was the colours suggested by the actual story, which he built up into the finished composition. In his Fairy Tales series, loosely based on stories like Rapunzel and the Princess and the Pea, he sets the memory of the time in which the tales were written within the context of the present, using marks and colours suggested by the narrative. In other paintings and more specifically where there is a lot of drawing he records the passage of time in lines and marks and this recording of the passage of time becomes a crucial element of how the work develops.

Dragomir’s influences are eclectic, Turner, Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Cy Twombly, Anselm Keifer etc. and understandable, given his expressionist tendencies and the freedom with which he applies paint. His admiration for Julie Mehretu is perhaps less immediately obvious until he explains, that he is, “ interested in the relationship between gestural painting and drawing in Mehretu’s work”. It was this marriage of painting and drawing in Mišina’s painting, Dust to Dust 3,
which led to it being awarded the Evolver Feature prize at the Royal West of England Academy Autumn Exhibition in 2013. Based on his researches into Dead Star phenomena and visually referencing images of the universe, its size, 200 cm wide by 120 cm high fulfilled his aim of “immersing and engaging the viewer”. Its web of fine interlocking lines replicate the passage of time through the repeated building up and subsequent destruction of layers during the process of making. It is the combining of vibrantly coloured gestural marks with a geometric framework which makes Mišina’s work arresting. The wildness in the handling of materials and subject matter is deceptive and far from indicating a lack of control is in fact carefully considered and orchestrated and further balanced by the restraint of an occasional hard edged line.

© Fiona Robinson 2014

Exhibitions:

Solo Exhibitions

2017 Smokescreen, 44AD artspace, Bath
2016 Line of Colour, 44AD artspace, Bath
2015 at first glance, The Pound Arts Centre, Cosham
2014 Alice, 44AD artspace, Bath
2013 Last Supper, 44AD artspace, Bath
2012 Ring a Ring o’ Roses, 44AD artspace, Bath
2012 Fairy Tales, Bath School of Art & Design, Bath


Selected Group Exhibitions

2018 No Name, San Carlos Museum. Mexico City
2018 Source, 44AD artspace, 4 Abbey Street, Bath
2018 Balance, 44AD artspace, 4 Abbey Street, Bath
2018 A Letter in Mind, Oxo Tower Gallery, London
2018 True Stories, 44AD artspace, 4 Abbey Street, Bath
2018 Live, FaB, Walcot Chapel, Bath
2018 The Launch, Deviation Street Magazine, 44AD artspace, 4 Abbey Street, Bath
2017 Exchange, 44AD artspace, Bath
2017 A Letter in Mind, Oxo Tower Gallery, London
2017 Studio, 44AD artspace, Bath
2017 Pay & Display Prize, Centrespace Gallery, Bristol
2016 No Name, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
2016 These Rose Tinted Glasses Have Never Let Me Down, 44AD artspace, Bath
2016 A Letter in Mind, Oxo Tower Gallery, London
2016 Pay & Display Prize,Centrespace Gallery, Bristol
2016 The Waiting Room, 44AD artspace, Bath
2015 The Apartment, Subject Gallery, New York City
2015 The Pound Arts Open, The Pound Arts Centre, Cosham
2015 Exchange, 44AD artspace, Bath
2014 162nd Annual Open Exhibition, RWA, Bristol
2014 A Letter in Mind, Oxo Tower Gallery, London
2014 Saatchi Screen Project, Saatchi Gallery, London
2014 I Claudius, 44AD artspace, Bath
2014 Evolver Prize, Atkinson Gallery, Street
2014 ‘Underland’, O3 Gallery, Oxford
2014 In Glorious Colour, Saatchi Art Showdown, Griffin Gallery, London
2013 161st Annual Open Exhibition, RWA, Bristol
2013 State of Play, Southgate Street, Bath
2013 Transfer, FaB, Southgate Street, Bath
2013 Out of the Dark, 44AD artspace, Bath
2013 Drawn, RWA, Bristol
2013 Forget who you are & everything you know, The Searchers contemporary, Bristol
2012 Please Do Not Bang Or Open The Cages, 44AD artspace, Bath
2012 tenplusone, 44AD artspace, Bath
2012 Free Range, Site Unseen, The Old Truman Brewery, London
2012 Bath School of Art and Design Degree Show, Bath
2011 159th Autumn Exhibition, RWA, Bristol


Collections

Bath Spa University
Private Collections including Agnes Gund Collection

Publications/Awards

2018 Selected as one of the top 10 finalists for the Bridgeman Studio Award
2018 Published interview in the Deviation Street Magazine
2018 Published work in the A5 Magazine, industry focused art zine.
2016 The New Collectors Book, a NY based Annual Art Publication
2016 Hotbook, Mexican magazine
2016 LAB zine, a USA, visual artists and media makers journal
2014 Selected by Saatchi Art for Collection Best of 2014
2014 Finalist, the Saatchi Art Showdown 'In Glorious Colour’
2014 Published interview in the Evolver Wessex art and culture magazine
2014 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection Made In Britain
2013 Won the Evolver Wessex Artist Award at RWA’s 161st Annual Open Exhibition
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection White Hot
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection Abstract Paintings
2013 Aesthetica, The Art & Culture Magazine
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection Rule Britannia; A spotlight on British Arts
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection Primary Colors
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection Bold Statement Works
2013 The Clifton Life Magazine
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection New This Week 04-29-2013
2013 Cover image on home page Saatchi Online for Collection New This Week 03-18-2013
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection The Bright Fantastic
2013 Selected by Saatchi Online for Collection London Calling: Art From the UK
2012 an magazine