Nikola Martinoski

Background

Nikola Martinoski was born Nikolache Martin in 1903 to an Aromanian family in Kuruşova (at the time part of the Ottoman Empire).

Education

Nikola Martinoski started his primary education in an Aromanian school in Skopje.

He attended a Serbian and Bulgarian school where he showed interest for drawing things together with the icon-painter Dimitat Andonov where the both of them acquired knowledge about icon painting and painting.

After the death of his father Kosta Martinoski, he was not in a good financial situation, but he still succeeded to continue his education in Bucharest, from 1920 – 1927, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. He attended the courses about drawing, decorative art and sculpture.

At the end of his studying, Martinoski was awarded the first prize for painting in his generation.

Martinoski spent two years in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, which is famous for former students Amedeo Modigliani and Boris Anrep and the Académie Ranson with artists like the Polish painter Moise Kisling and Roger Bissiere, who acted as mentors. This period had a major impact on his life and style as a painter.

Career

Martinoski came back to Skopje brimming with avant-garde ideas about art. He developed a very specific expressionistic style and started dealing with social themes rather than portraits. Nikola soon became a member of the Belgrade group Oblik.

His first individual exhibition was in 1929 in Skopje. Afterwards, he started exhibiting in other cities such as Belgrade, Zagreb and Paris. While he continued drawing, painting, and exhibiting, Martinoski also began creating large murals. Later, he established the Artistic Gallery located in Skopje (now known as the National Gallery of Macedonia) and won numerous awards.

Martinoski died on February 7, 1973, at the age of sixty-nine in Skopje, then in Yugoslavia. He gave sixty-two of his paintings to Kruševo as a parting gift.

In 2003, the National Gallery of Macedonia completed the project "100 years from Martinoski's birth". The exhibition featured paintings that had never been publicly shown before because they were part of 116 paintings that Martinoski left to his family in a nondescript box.

Achievements

• Martinoski was one of the most important people for the development of the Macedonian culture in the 20th century.
  
  His home in Kruševo is now a gallery where a small number of his works are exhibited.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Mother with Child

  • Self-portrait

  • Gypsy woman with a red blouse

  • Aisha

  • Gypsy woman drinking coffee

  • Girl playing the piano

  • In The Cafe

  • Self-portrait

  • Nurture

  • Self Portrait

  • Still life with a skull

  • "Bride" (1937) (Detail)

  • Bust of a woman

  • Waitress

  • Still Life - Bordeux

Views

Many of Martinoski's works were greatly influenced by medieval fresco art and modern Parisian school crisscross. However, his strongest artistic creations were portraits.