In Memoriam: Mihailo Mujo Jovićević, professor and artist of grand format
Two days before New Year, our dear and beloved professor, colleague and friend Mihailo-Mujo Jovićević passed away. He intuitively entitled “Year 2020” his last exhibition organized in May, this artist of inexhaustible energy, creatively vital to the very end of life.
Our professor Mujo was, among those so rare and precious people, who in their character carry and spread natural gentleness and human warmth, rounded off by one lucid kind of subtle humor. Completely his own and authentic, as well as his grandiose work of art, his professional and human integrity was valued among colleagues and a favorite professor among students. The results of his dedicated long-term pedagogical and creative work are embedded in the foundations of our institution, as well as in the lasting values of Montenegrin culture and education.
Professor Jovićević was a student of the famous Herceg Novi Art School, and he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and postgraduate studies in Belgrade. He specialized in painting in the master workshop of Milo Milunović, and conservation with Milorad Medić. He was a professor at the Cetinje Gymnasium, curator and museum advisor at the "Museums of Cetinje" institution, professor at the Faculty of Culture and full professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje. He was a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trebinje and a professor at the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Mediterranean University in Podgorica. He is the winner of the highest state recognition - the Thirteenth of July Award and had the status of a prominent Montenegrin cultural creator. His artistic work has been presented at over forty solo exhibitions, several of which have been officially declared a cultural event in Montenegro. His works were included in the most important presentations of Montenegrin art abroad. He participated in major restoration projects in Montenegro, such as the relocation of the Piva Monastery and the conservation of the Roman mosaic in Risan. He managed conservation and restoration works on the Relief of Montenegro within the Billiards and over 1,500 paintings from the collection of the National Museum in Cetinje.
Professor Jovićević is one of the most important and prolific contemporary Montenegrin artists. Inspired and consistent with philosophical-religious themes, with ascetic devotion he built his authentic spiritual, metaphysical world of symbols and palimpsests centered on Man, God and the Universe. His rich artistic opus of over ten thousand works, created in a six-decade-long creative research process, embodied in various expressive forms and technological performances, from sketches, drawings, gouache to paintings, polyptychs, objects and installations, monumental artistic power, we believe that only awaits comprehensive decipherment, analysis, and valid posterior positioning in the context of enduring and universal artistic values.
We will end this commemorative note with words about Jovićević's work from the text of Don Branko Sbutega: “... I stand before this opus confidential, thoughtful and not very calm. These are not images of illustrations of sacral spaces, they themselves rise to the level of autochthonous sacrality primarily because children are evidently one soul who - intuitively, or reflexively, I do not know? - sees with their own eyes and shapes with their own hands what is usually not available to us. Hat down Gentlemen, here's an artist!“
Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Montenegro
Text prepared by prof. Nataša Đurović