City Imprint: one sculptor draws, the other assembles
The Salon of the National Museum in Zrenjanin opens „Otisak grada“ on August 4, with drawings by Milorad Misa Cveticanin and sculptures by Miodrag Misa Peric.
A suitcase made of wood, iron and goat fur, measuring 110 by 120 by 50 centimetres, will not fit in any luggage rack and cannot be carried anywhere. It is called “Nedozvoljen prtljag tailor-made”, it was made in 2016, it is signed by the sculptor Miodrag Misa Peric, and it is one of the works going on view in “Otisak grada”, or City Imprint. The show opens on Tuesday, August 4, 2026, at 7 p.m. in the Salon of the National Museum in Zrenjanin.
The exhibition pairs two names and two media. The drawings are by Milorad Misa Cveticanin, the sculptures by Peric, and both men trained as sculptors. Twenty three years separate their birth years, enough for two artistic biographies to have taken shape under entirely different conditions, and that gap is where the tension of this show sits. The National Museum in Zrenjanin says City Imprint will stay up until early October 2026, more than two months, an unusually long run for a Salon programme and one that carries the show across the end of summer and into the new cultural season.
The two artists
Milorad Misa Cveticanin was born in Novi Sad in 1948. He finished grammar school and the fine arts stream of the Higher Pedagogical School, then took his degree in sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. He belongs to SULUV, the Association of Fine Artists of Vojvodina, and to the Likovni krug group, and he founded VIV ART, a workshop that worked in interior design and spatial installations in metal and glass. His studio is at the Petrovaradin Fortress, casemate atelier 18A.
Miodrag Peric is also from Novi Sad, born in 1971. He graduated from the sculpture department of the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad in 1997, and defended his master’s thesis only in 2024, at the department of sculpture, spatial form and medal art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Trebinje, under associate professor Djordje Arnaut. He is a member of SULUV and of the European Artists Association. Twenty seven years between a degree and a master’s is not a line one often reads in a sculptor’s CV, and it says more about the economics of the profession here than any list of group shows.
Why is a sculptor showing drawings?
Cveticanin is a sculptor who is exhibiting drawings, and that is the key to the show rather than a curiosity. A sculptor’s drawing is normally a working document, a sketch for something that has yet to acquire mass and weight, so when such a drawing is hung as a finished thing it brings with it everything that was never built. Peric works from the opposite end, joining materials that have no business sitting next to each other: wood and iron, wood and aluminium, wood and goat fur.
Among the announced works are:
- “Nedozvoljen prtljag tailor-made” from 2016, mixed media in wood, iron and goat fur, 110 by 120 by 50 centimetres
- “Autoportret”, or Self-portrait, in wood and aluminium, 75 by 40 by 30 centimetres
- a wood and iron piece from 2020, 50 by 40 by 50 centimetres
The museum’s announcement describes the show as “a dialogue between two authors who match each other in sensibility and complement each other perfectly in their difference”. That is a polite, faintly institutional formula, and the more interesting part of the story is probably where the complementing breaks down. By the museum’s own account the two artists work with the themes of everyday life and with mapping the pulse of a city, a task in which drawing and object sit badly together: a drawing can leave the city unfinished, while a sculpture has to close it inside a material you can walk around.
What the trip to Zrenjanin buys you
Both artists share one address, the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, decades apart, so City Imprint doubles as a small cross section of one sculpture school seen through two of its graduates who have since drifted into different materials. The title promises a document about a city, but what the Salon actually puts up is the question of where a drawing stops being a note and an object starts being a claim.
For anyone following contemporary Vojvodina sculpture outside the galleries of Novi Sad and Belgrade, this is a two month window and it costs nothing but the journey. A city measured by a suitcase that cannot be carried is probably described more accurately than it would be by any photograph of a facade.
