Mihael Milunović's "The Costume Has a Crack in It" Opens at Steinhauser Gallery in Bratislava

Empty suits, vacant chairs and institutional furniture populate Mihael Milunović's paintings, where authority's outward signs persist while the people behind them vanish. The Belgrade-born artist's solo show, "The Costume Has a Crack in It," runs from 10 September to 31 October 2026 at Steinhauser Gallery in Bratislava, curated by Jovana Ilić. It marks the gallery's 59th solo exhibition. Rather than simply indicting power's emptiness, Milunović proposes that social conventions survive only through our willingness to recognize and comply with them. Born in 1967, he studied painting at Belgrade's Faculty of Fine Arts and at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His practice spans painting, drawing, photography, video, sculpture and installation, often turning familiar objects and situations into something unsettling. The canvases withhold resolution: a hand reaching from a black cavity, a figure continuing its work amid surrounding chaos, tiny characters inside disproportionate architecture. A single crack in an image, the artist suggests, is enough to make certainties waver. In a present where images circulate faster than our capacity to verify them, the paintings ask viewers to slow down and consider how much of what we call real depends on how we have learned to look. The title implies no mask fully conceals what lies behind it.