Milan Ivanič – From the Elbe to the Lune

Milan Ivanič  has lived in England since 1970. He lives in Lancaster and has worked as a full time artist since 1986 when his wife Roz started working at Lancaster University in the Linguistics Department. Originally from the former Czechoslovakia, Milan had a formal art school training in Prague, at the Hollar School of Art  and the prestigious  Prague Academy of Fine Arts.

In the exhibition in Settle, there are examples of his early drawings of the river Elbe from when he was at school and recent paintings of the river Lune near his home in Lancaster. Included in the exhibition which spans fifty years of work are a number his sketchbooks.

A number of paintings are of the Sussex landscape and coast, the county where he first lived when he came to England.

His work is in private collections in the UK, US, Canada, Brazil, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands and has been selected and exhibited in major national open competitions in London including: The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, The BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and the The Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries.

“I want to make pictures that people will look at again and again and see something different every time.” Milan Ivanic

Milan grew up in the village of Sebuzín, where the Elbe travels north into the mountains which divide Czecholsovakia (as it was at that time) from Germany.  This was the landscape he loved and the subject of many of his early graphic works which are in the exhibition.

‘Church at Devil’s Dyke’ is a painting which represents a crossroads in Milan’s life: his re-location to England in 1970. He left Czechoslovakia to marry Roz, thinking he would never return. At first they lived together with her family in Sussex, and Milan came to know the South Downs and Sussex coast: it was his first encounter with the sea. This coast, especially Seaford Head, and his love of the sea figure in other paintings in the exhibition.

Milan has lived in many places in England, often returning to the places he loves in Sussex, but since 1986 the north of England has been his ‘home’, the landscape of Lancashire and Yorkshire, especially the walks and rivers there, as many of the rest of the paintings in the exhibition show.

Roz Ivanič has written a book about Milan.
The book is as yet unpublished. Please ask at the desk in the gallery if you would like to see this unpublished work.

Please scroll down to see a selection of images from the exhibition.