“I don’t let a lot of people into my studio,” says Tomislav Nikolic by way of introduction.
We’re wandering through his workspace at the back of the graffiti-spangled warehouse in inner Melbourne that he shares with his partner, designer Donald Holt. The walls are lined with unfinished canvases, the cement floor is mottled with multicoloured drips, plastic-covered tables are stacked with old hummus tubs filled with thin washes of paint. “I have a friend who eats a lot of hummus,” he explains. An astonishing amount. They’re one-kilogram tubs.
Nikolic’s aversion to visitors is twofold: random comments, even praise, can leave him ruminating for months; and his unfinished paintings look nothing like their final incarnation.
While it’s a truism that an artwork can be fully appreciated only in the flesh, the rule applies without exception to Nikolic’s extraordinary colour field paintings. A shimmering halo or aura emanates from his works, an otherworldly incandescence that simply cannot be captured by camera. This radiance is the result of a laborious process that Nikolic has refined over the years. He brushes hundreds of layers of transparent washes of acrylic paint suffused with marble dust onto the canvas until it seems to glow from within. His frames are central to the final effect, whether gilded in copper or gold leaf or elaborately moulded in historic styles and painted in incongruously bright colours.
Comparisons to Mark Rothko are inevitable, but Nikolic’s works also recall the joyous, misty light of the impressionists. He cites many inspirations, Rothko certainly, but also Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler, Howard Hodgkin, Agnes Martin, Caravaggio and Monet.
Big year ahead
Aged 46, Nikolic has just been announced the winner of this year’s Bulgari Art Award. A five-year-old prize for mid-career Australian painters, it comprises $50,000 for the Art Gallery of New South Wales to acquire one of his works, and a $30,000 residency in Italy.
“It’s still freaking me out,” Nikolic says. “I feel honoured. I feel grateful. I’m overwhelmed. I just can’t imagine what it’s going to do and what the flow-on will be.”
In Italy, Nikolic plans to visit paint and frame manufacturers who use traditional methods, and connect with contemporary artists, especially to learn how they cope with the weight of that country’s art history.
The painting being acquired by the AGNSW, the gallery’s first by Nikolic, is a vast 2.34 metres wide and 1.84 metres high. At the time of interview only the outer edges are finished, washes of deep crimson and green. He’s already applied 250 coats of paint, working from the outside in, and expects to add a further 100 before it’s done.
Nikolic doesn’t yet know how it will look, but knows how it should feel, and it is this feeling that he intuitively follows as he paints. Above all, Nikolic wants his work to have an emotional effect. This one, which has been challenging him for years, is about “awakening” and “renewal”. “Renewal often means death,” he says. “The ending of one thing and the beginning of another. It sounds really wanky to me when I talk about it because it can be so easily misinterpreted.” Ultimately, he says, it’s the object itself that matters, and the viewer’s response to it.
Childhood trauma
Growing up in south-east Victoria in the small town of Sale, Nikolic was an unusual child, inquisitive and an avid reader. He endured his share of bullying. “I had what I can only describe as a traumatic existence in Sale,” he says.
But Sale was also his making. The surrounding countryside was “magical” and two teachers at his Catholic boys’ school encouraged his creativity: art teacher Debbie Cooper, who would pack students into her car and set out at dawn for the National Gallery of Victoria; and drama teacher Elizabeth Brown, who had an art collection and a cosmopolitan take on life.
They pointed Nikolic to the possibilities of art and he leapt at them. Aged 16, he would take the train to the city and drop into art and architecture lectures at the University of Melbourne. Aged 17, he left home, escaping a strained relationship with his parents, who had migrated to Australia from the former Yugoslavia in 1970. Nikolic was born two months after their arrival.
“Once I left home that whole idea of going to university disappeared because I had to support myself,” he says.
Self-taught
Nikolic is self-taught. In the early 1990s he considered enrolling in an art degree, but felt that the courses were prescriptive and confined, and that student friends were compromising their inclinations. He persisted on his own and has been exhibiting since the mid-1990s, developing a strong following in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. His paintings now sell for up to $70,000 and have been shown at Art Basel Hong Kong for the past five years.
Two years ago he was finally able to stop working full time as a sales consultant with Space Furniture to focus entirely on his art, a success he credits to Sydney’s Jensen Gallery, with whom he’s exhibited since 2012. The Bulgari prize, I suggest, is a vindication of his tenacity. “I don’t like to think of vindication,” he says. “The reality is I’m indifferent to recognition. It’s nice to have it, but what’s more important is I’d rather just make more work.”
