Mila Dobrevska’s work emerges from the places she has travelled through, the journeys she has undertaken, the stories she has heard and the people she has encountered along the way. From these seemingly ordinary starting points, the artist opens up a space for reflection on the construction of identity, collective memory and cultural heritage, including their relationship with Macedonian folk traditions. The female figure lies at the heart of her research. Her portraits do not depict specific individuals; instead, they become symbolic sites for investigating the meaning of authenticity and the construction of personal and collective identity in a world shaped by social expectations and performative identities.
This theme lies at the heart of Right and Reason: a female bust rendered in vivid shades of orange, with deep blue hair, that gives visual form to the inner struggle between the expectations society places upon women – care, sacrifice and propriety – and the personal desire for emancipation and independence. This is not an act of surrender but a continuous, tireless negotiation between social obligations and denied freedoms.
Against Restraint expands this reflection to encompass Macedonian cultural identity. The work takes its inspiration from pirej, the Macedonian word for couch grass, a plant capable of regenerating even after being uprooted, provided it touches the earth once again. More intricate than the previous figure, the female bust develops upwards in a spiral – perhaps an arm, perhaps the couch grass itself. It culminates in a yellow flower, a symbol of resilience, translating into sculptural form this ability to bend without breaking. This symbolism also recalls the novel Pirej by Petre M. Andreevski (1980), in which the plant becomes a metaphor for the Macedonian people and their endurance throughout history.
Deliberately eccentric, colourful and textured, with bold, decisive features, Dobrevska’s figures occupy an ambiguous space between figuration and abstraction. Their formal structure recalls Cubism through the fragmentation of faces into multiple perspectives: each work consists of several distinct elements that together generate a particular visual dynamism. This formal device compels us to pause, look again and observe from another point of view, revealing how identity and memory are neither fixed nor singular constructs, but fluid, fragmented and continually redefined according to the position from which they are observed.
Mila Dobrevska (b. 1999, Skopje) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Milan whose practice spans painting, sculpture, mosaic and installation. Through the human figure, her work investigates themes including cultural identity, collective memory and Macedonian folklore. She completed both her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna, specialising in contemporary mosaic, and is a member of the Society of Fine Arts of Macedonia and MARTE (Association for Contemporary Mosaic) in Ravenna. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Ravenna Biennale of Contemporary Mosaic and the Dolenjski Museum in Slovenia, and she has presented solo exhibitions in Skopje, Barcelona, Ljubljana, Ohrid and Turin.
Text by Mirta Gianocca