Four paintings, two fine art prints and one drawing, created between 2021 and 2026, trace Serbian artist Milenko Stevanović’s first years in Cyprus and explore portraiture as an act of reciprocal observation. A new exhibition at the Nicosia Gallery, In Toto, presents his works.

Opening on Thursday, September 17 at 7pm, the Closely Observed exhibition will run until October 15 and also host two parallel events – a conversation with the artist and Diomedes Koufteros on September 24 at 7pm and a guided tour with Michael Pavlides on October 2 at 7pm.

Curated by Constantinos Kyprianou and presented by ABR – Alternative Brains Rule – organisers say “observation is often imagined as a one-way act: one person looks while another is seen.

“Closely Observed unsettles this assumption. Over the prolonged duration of painting from life, the distinction between observer and observed gradually dissolves. Looking becomes reciprocal. Attention accumulates. Time alters perception.

“For Milenko, the sitter is never simply the subject of a painting, but the starting point of the creative process. The encounter unfolds as a continuous negotiation between structure and intuition, discipline and instinct, emotional proximity and analytical distance. The hours shared by artist and sitter allow likeness to give way to something less descriptive and more elusive: a field in which colour, weight, rhythm and light begin to shape a different way of seeing.”

As such, the exhibition’s focus, and title, has a double meaning – the presentation of pieces which are a result of close observation but also the showcase itself becomes an observation of the artist’s own life.

“Gathered together,” organisers explain, “the seven works in the exhibition become less a survey of portraits than a portrait of proximity: of the people, spaces and everyday rituals that have shaped a life on the island.”

Joining this body of work, is a self-portrait which in a way, completes a full circle in the notion of observation as the observer himself enters the image.

“The act of looking turns back upon itself. What begins as an observation of others becomes, inevitably, a process of self-observation. Closely Observed proposes that attention is never neutral. It transforms both the person who is seen and the person who sees.”

Closely Observed

Exhibition by Milenko Stevanović. Curated by Constantinos Kyprianou and presented by ABR – Alternative Brains Rule. September 17-October 15. In Toto Gallery, Nicosia. Opening night: 7pm. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 5pm-7.30pm. Saturday: 10am –1pm. Also during Laou Laou event on Sunday: 10–1pm and 3.30pm-7.30pm. www.milenkostevanovic.com,  www.alternativebrainsrule.com