For viennacontemporary 2025, we are presenting Baldo Diodato, Milica Kecman, and Miro Vuco. Each of the selected artists develops specific methodologies aimed at examining the interrelations between form, material, and the conceptual framework of artistic expression. In their practices, the artistic act is not the result of spontaneous expression, but a mode of analytical and mental inquiry into the conditions that define the very possibility of the image, the object, and the artistic event.
Baldo Diodato (b. 1938, Naples, Italy) developed his artistic practice over several decades spent in the United States, particularly in Philadelphia and New York, focusing on imprinting and frottage as methods of recording collective traces of urban environments. His works emerge from direct interaction with the material reality of the city, whereby the artistic act takes on the form of a tautological process — inscribing traces of reality as a self-contained signifying gesture. In line with the tenets of analytical art, Diodato’s practice challenges the limits of representation, concentrating instead on the structural conditions of artistic production and reception.
Milica Kecman (1960, Ruma, Serbia – 2021, Bosanski Petrovac, B&H), with the artistic pseudonym Lipa Mill, developed her work in continuity with the avant-garde currents of Zenitism and Dadaism. By adopting a name that refers to Anuška Micić (member of the first Zenitist avant-garde circle of the 1920s, wife of Zenitism founder Ljubomir Micić, and head of the Belgrade branch of the Lipa Mill paper company) Kecman activated the historical and symbolic layers of local avant-garde heritage as a basis for her own artistic inquiry. In her Ikon-stelation series, Kecman approaches the image as an operative unit of analytical thought: sequences of geometric fields, symbolic marks, and textual traces function as modular systems enabling the parallel articulation of rhythm, measure, and meaning. Her practice thus constructs a transdisciplinary matrix in which personal and collective avant-garde impulses are processually rearticulated and reintegrated.
Miro Vuco (1941, Vojnić Sinjski – 2025, Zagreb, Croatia)
approaches painting as an extended process in which the making of a single image often spans years, even decades. In his practice, individual works consist of ten or more painted-over and overlapping layers, each new iteration emerging from and built upon the previous one. Vuco never considers these works finished; as long as they remain in his studio, they remain open to further intervention. This working method reflects a fundamentally process-based and analytical approach in which painting is not conceived as representation, but as a continuous practice of examination, revision, and accumulation of meaning within the material structure of the image.
Through their distinct approaches, the works of Baldo Diodato, Milica Kecman, and Miro Vuco testify to art as a site of epistemological inquiry in which form, material, and process are not mere vehicles of expression, but constitutive elements of the artistic phenomenon itself. Their practices raise the question of the ontological status of the artwork, understood as the trace of a procedure, a structure of inscription, and a manifestation of thought embedded in the material space of creation.
DOWNLOAD PUBLICATION