When the Museum of Contemporary Art was mounting its “Art in Chicago, 1945-1995” exhibit in 1996, there was one artist the curators couldn’t track down. Konstantin Milonadis, according to the catalog, taught sculpture at the University of Notre Dame until the early 70s, but the “subsequent whereabouts and activities of the artist” were “unknown.”
Milonadis–“Mickey” to his American friends–was born in a “small town of no significance” on the Dnieper River in central Ukraine, and as a schoolkid he used to draw in his textbooks because “you couldn’t go out and buy a fancy type of paper,” he says. He put his artistic ambitions on hold when he was conscripted into the Soviet army as a teenager in the early 1940s–he never finished school–and his unit saw fierce fighting against retreating Nazi forces. “All you know is that somebody’s shooting, something’s exploding, and you try to dig yourself as deep into the ground as you can….In war you learn the hard way that history is much more fun to study than to make.”
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After earning his degree in 1959 Milonadis moved back to Ukrainian Village. He began exhibiting his small-scale kinetic sculptures made from steel, piano wire, and other elements, sometimes incorporating small pieces of sheet steel for friction, weight, gravity, and balance.
Milonadis uses his hands and simple tools like pliers, clippers, and files to shape the wires, then joins them with silver-soldering and precision welding. Parts of the sculptures are delicately balanced or hinged upon gimbals, pivots, sockets, and springs–a light touch will set them in complex motion. But even when static, the pieces have a visual rhythm. They also show a playful fascination with science, evoking signal towers, antennae clusters, clock interiors, space stations, UFOs.
Where: Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art, 2320 W. Chicago
