Milenko Prvački is a Singapore artist and art educator. Born in the former Yugoslavia and trained as an artist in Romania, he migrated to Singapore in 1991 during the Yugoslav wars. Since then, he has taught at LASALLE College of the Arts for two decades, first as a fine arts lecturer, then as a faculty dean and now as a senior fellow and coordinator of its Tropical Lab.

He has also continued his art practice here, developing over the decades a profound body of work that has enriched Singapore's visual art scene. For his significant contributions to art, he has been honoured with the title of the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) from the French government, and the Cultural Medallion from the Singapore government.

Milenko Prvački was born on 12 November 1951, the only child of an accountant and a housewife, in Novi Kozjak (formerly known as Ferdin), Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, during the country's totalitarian communist regime. His family home was in a small village 60km from Belgrade and he had as neighbours, a German artist and his wife.

The artist often invited young Prvački and his best friend to play with paints in his studio-home. By the time Prvački turned 11, he had, under his guidance, learnt to copy famous paintings such as those by Monet and Picasso. By the time he turned 12, he was sure he wanted to become an artist.

In Vojvodina, from 1964 to 1969, Prvački attended the Serbian tertiary institution Gimnazija "Uroš Predić" Pančevo. In 1970, he enrolled in the Institutul de Arte Plastice "Nicolae Grigorescu" (Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts) in the bustling city of Bucharest, Romania, where he studied philosophy, drawing (in particular, anatomy) and painting within the limits of the academy's rigorous methodology.

In 1971 while he was still studying, Prvački held his first solo exhibition, Paintings & Drawings, at Galerija mladih, Pančevo, Yugoslavia. In 1974, he held a second solo exhibition Drawings at the Yugoslav Embassy in Bucharest. That year, he received the Pesak Summer Painting Symposium Award in Pančevo, Yugoslavia. He graduated five years later in 1975 with both a master's degree in Fine Arts (Painting), and a girlfriend, fellow Romanian student Delia who would later become his wife.

After he graduated, Prvački returned to Yugoslavia where he and Delia married and his work was quickly recognised. In 1976, a daughter, Ana, was born. Although he found a job in 1978 as the Manager of Galerija savremene umetnosti (Gallery of Contemporary Art) at Centar za kulturu Pančevo (Pančevo Cultural Centre) in Vojvodina, a job he held until 1991, he devoted himself to his art and was very productive.

He held 15 solo exhibitions throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s up until 1990. He founded the Yugoslav Sculpture Exhibition in 1981, and participated in several art symposiums in various countries in Central Europe. His early paintings, such as those in his Dialog (1975–1979) and Heroes (1977) series reflected his engagement with the politics of Yugoslavia at the time with their socio-political overtones and satirical figures depicting alienation and the breakdown of communication.

He also explored his observation of political leaders (especially then President Josip Broz Tito) flaunting hunted "trophies" with his Trophy paintings, which grew from symbolic animal fur trophies (depicting both the fur side and the bloody skin side), the grisly rewards of hunting, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to landscape trophies, reaped from the conquest of territory, in the ‘80s and ‘90s. By then, Prvački started exploring his own ideas about non-socio-political issues such as visual language with the use of abstraction, and for the first time, collage in the ‘80s.

It was around the same time when Prvački became an internationally celebrated artist, and won much acclaim. His many awards during this decade include the Annual Art Society Award in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (1980), the Faber-Castell Award in Nurnberg, Germany (1982), the Special Jury Award at the 17th International Painting Exhibition, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France (1985), and the Special Jury Award from Academie Internationale De Lutèce, France (1986)

Yet, despite his success, life was becoming more and more unstable in Prvački’s home country. Back then, Yugoslavia was known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was a tenuous and troubled federation made up of six ethnically-diverse republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Serbia (including Kosovo and Vojvodina where Prvacki was from). It was rapidly crumbling under the onslaught of the Yugoslav wars.

In 1991, an escalation of inter-state conflicts, uprisings and civil unrest led to the dissolution of the federation. At that time, an old colleague of Prvački’s asked him to travel to Singapore for two months to work with her as an artistic designer of sets for a German company, which was working on the now-defunct Maritime Museum in Sentosa.

Prvački had never been to Asia but took up the offer, and after a month, he was offered a two-year contract. A few months later, his wife Delia and their daughter Ana left war-torn Yugoslavia and joined him in Singapore.

Prvački worked at the Singapore Maritime Showcase for two years. His new life in Singapore gave him a fresh outlook on both life and his practice, and his earliest paintings made in Singapore, which was expansive and more abstract, reflected that. In mid 1992, a teenaged Ana enrolled in LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts to study theatre.

LASALLE's founder, Joseph McNally, took an interest in Prvački's work after hearing about Ana’s account of the family's migration. In 1993, Prvački held his first solo exhibition in Singapore, Paintings, with his wife Delia at LASALLE's Earl Lu Gallery upon invitation by McNally

Another solo exhibition followed, Paintings & Drawings, which was organised by ART-2 Gallery, at The Substation Gallery. The following year, he held two more solo exhibitions—Untitled with his wife Delia at Singapore's Noble House, and Tropical Rain – Drawings at Centar za Vizuelnu Kulturu Zlatno Oko (Zlatno Oko Centre for Visual Culture) back in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia.

Then in 1994, McNally invited him to teach at the school and Prvački took up the offer to become a principal lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE. Prvački had been hesitant as, at the time, he spoke very little English, but McNally had given him six months to learn it. When Prvački arrived at LASALLE, he made a few dramatic improvements. He introduced individual tutorials and group critiques. Later, he also reduced teaching hours, giving students more time to practice.

Prvački’s first few years in Singapore proved challenging as he juggled the demands of his new job and spending time with his family, learning English, dealing with a sense of loss from having left his homeland, and working on his art. He also spent time getting to know his new surroundings in the tropics, making a few trips to countries in the region with Delia.

Throughout the ‘90s and 2000s, he was very productive, holding at least one solo exhibition virtually every year, several were collaborations with his wife. He also participated in many group exhibitions in Singapore and other countries including Thailand, China, Hong Kong, UK, Ireland, France, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Serbia and Australia.

Among his most successful exhibitions was The Ultimate Visual Dictionary, held together with Delia, at Caldwell House Gallery in CHIJMES in 1998. Prvački spoke mostly German and Serbian and had first approached the notion of the "dictionary" when he had to rely on a Romanian dictionary in his initial years studying in Bucharest.

He revisited the idea again when he had to rely on an English dictionary to get by during his early days in Singapore. Then, in 1997, a family trip to Australia and the Northern Territory deserts brought things together. Drawing his observations of the indigenous land in a sketchbook, the idea of collecting his images for use as a source for future work occurred to him, and The Ultimate Visual Dictionary was born. It became a series that was remarkable for the way it explored, among other notions, our relationship with prescribed meaning and the necessary plurality of meaning and ambiguity in language, specifically, visual language.

It was also during the ‘90s and 2000s that Prvački became active in the Singapore art community, participating in numerous events including a field trip organised by the Art Forum Gallery for artists from Singapore and Indonesia in 1996 and an artist talk at the FEAST! Food in Art exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum in 2000.

He even brought his newfound knowledge of Singapore and regional art back to his homeland of the former Yugoslavia when he participated in an artists' talk on Southeast Asian Art in Belgrade in 2001. That year, he created three massive outdoor works entitled Beehives using concrete, brick, sand, mosaic and other materials. Located on LASALLE's premises at Goodman Road, they were a departure from his paintings, collages, and works on paper, and were part of his exhibition at Earl Lu Gallery, Construction Site, exploring the construction of three-dimensional "images", "methods" and "materials".

In 2002, Prvački reached two milestones in his life. He became a Singapore citizen, and he was appointed Dean of LASALLE's Faculty of Fine Arts. After two successful solo exhibitions in Singapore that year, he held another solo exhibition in 2003 in the former Yugoslavia, only his second there since he left the country 12 years ago. Construction Site, which had been held at Earl Lu Gallery the year before, was held at several venues—the Likovna galerija, Kulturni centar Beograda (Art Gallery, Belgrade Cultural Center) in Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro; Galerija savremene umetnosti, Centar za kulturu Pančevo (Contemporary Art Gallery, Centre for Culture Pančevo) in Serbia and Montenegro; and City Art Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

There, it had special resonance for its allusions to the cycle of tearing down and rebuilding that applies to so many civilisations in the world, something Prvački had observed when he had travelled with Delia to Rajasthan, India, in 1999 and to Turkey in 2002.

Despite a busy schedule, Prvački continued to put up solo exhibitions every year and also heavily involved in academia. He served as a Visiting Professor three times, once at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, Japan in 2004, then at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2010, and lastly at Washington University in 2015. He also participated in an artist talk at the Istanbul Biennale 07 in 2007 and a panel discussion on Contemporary South East Asian Painting at the Singapore Art Museum, and conducted a workshop at Singapore's new School of the Arts. He is currently Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, Australia, having been appointed in 2014.

In 2005, he founded the Tropical Lab, an annual international art workshop at LASALLE, which he continues to coordinate as "Tropical King". A yearly two-week event which brings Master's candidates from the world's top arts institutions together to research, experiment and collaborate in order to create contemporary art, Tropical Lab has since become an important programme that has yielded fruitful exchanges and work.

In 2011, Prvački was made LASALLE's Senior Fellow in the Office of the President. That same year, he was conferred the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French government, in recognition of his significant contributions to the arts. The following year, he also received the Cultural Medallion.

That year, Prvački held two solo exhibitions that took the artist and his audience back to his past. Remembrance of Things Past, held at iPRECIATION in Hong Kong, looked back to his past, remembering his beginnings in his homeland, a country that he said "does not exist anymore".

Milenko Prvački: A Survey, 1979 – 2012, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore in LASALLE College of the Arts, displayed his development as an artist. It featured more than 100 works spanning for decades of his practice, from his early, more figurative paintings thickly imbued with socio-political significance to his later works of non-narrative abstraction (featuring not only paintings, but collages, watercolours, sketchbooks and notebooks) that explored his concerns about visual language, with the notions of representation, collection and construction, with history, displacement, loss and memory.

Today, Prvački’s works may be found in the permanent collections of various national museums and corporate bodies in Singapore, the former Yugoslavia, Australia and Germany including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the Museum of Contemporary Drawing in Nurnberg, Germany, Gallery of New South West, Sydney, National Gallery and the Singapore Art Museum.

They may also be found in many private collections around the world in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, The Netherlands, and the United States.

Prvački continues to engage participants with workshops and exhibitions at Tropical Lab, and to coordinate and edit the Tropical Lab PRESS, and fine arts newspaper PRAXIS PRESS and art journal, ISSUE (both of which he founded).

Emotional without being nostalgic, historical without being chronological, Prvački’s art is, in many ways, a process of remembrance by an artist who has always been fully engaged with the world and the communities he has lived in. They are also deeply marked by his life experiences, and his inability to both fully remember and forget them.