Totemic is the first word that comes to mind when contemplating the oeuvre of the late Serbian sculptor Momčilo Milovanović. This impression, instantaneous as it may be, is anything but superficial, and Milovanović’s extraordinary life provides vital clues to the genius of his often towering works.

Milovanović was born in 1921 in the small town of Smederevska Palanka in eastern Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia. Although the town wasn’t far from the capital, Belgrade, Milovanović spent his youth in the countryside, where he developed the relationship with nature that would have a profound effect on his later work. As a teenager, he moved to Belgrade with his father and uncles, helping out with the family business after having dropped out of secondary school. In 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded and quickly fell under Nazi control; by 1943, Milovanović had escaped to Vienna to avoid forced labor and, at the behest of an acquaintance, enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Later that year, he was arrested while trying to visit Munich’s Pinakothek art museum. He managed to escape from prison one year later, returning to Belgrade to join the army just as the Second World War drew to a close. Finally, in 1950, after a decade of displacement, he enrolled in Belgrade’s Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 28.

At the time, artistic training in Yugoslavia was still grounded in figurative representation, and Milovanović received a thoroughly classical training while financing his studies by working as a manual laborer. His work from this period betrays a somewhat stifling, academic influence, but he also began working with scraps of wood and metal—a testament to a life of struggle and hard work.

In 1960, after obtaining his specialization in sculpture, Milovanović traveled to Paris with nothing but 50 francs in his pocket. There, he discovered abstraction in sculpture through the work of Constantin Brâncuși and began to experiment with this new style, oscillating between figuration and abstraction throughout the next decade. Some of his bronzes, such as the elegantly polished Oeuf Cassé, betray Brâncuși’s influence, but the visual weight, symmetry and sense of reverence given to the object hint at Milovanović’s developing formal idiom. Torse de Jeune Homme, one of his smaller works from the same period, takes on a refined, asymmetrical and almost Hellenistic form. But it is wood’s irregular and coarse grain that was to become the sculptor’s trademark. While refining his sculpture, he continued producing small paintings on discarded wood during this period, which he sold to make a living.

It did not take long for Milovanović to gain acclaim: During his first exhibition in 1961 at the Galerie des Jeunes, his work was noticed by art critic Denys Chevalier, who brought him to the attention of the French Minister of Culture.

An artistic breakthrough came in 1970 when Milovanović returned to abstraction for good. The following two decades marked a period of prodigious activity for the sculptor and produced a coherent output. Although he employed a range of materials—wood, marble, concrete, steel, aluminum, copper and bronze—the sculptures became more robust, more rhythmically textured, and more totemic. The veins in marble and the cracks in wood are used to give an almost primal, earthy quality to his more mature works. The totems vary in size, some small and precious, others sublime and monumental, commissioned to give a strong sense of place and identity, often to public spaces.

“Milovanović is a doyen and one of the most important contemporary artists in Serbian sculpture,” says Paris-based Serbian-born artist and critic Milija Belić, who helped organize a retrospective of Milovanović’s work in Belgrade in 2010. “Although reduced and simple, these fundamental geometric works are laden with archetypal meanings.”

There is a strong naturalist streak in Milovanović’s work, as well as a nod to folklore. This latter notion, says Belić, should be understood in the context of Victor Vasarely’s Planetary Folklore, a series of compositions in which the artist used a limited number of visual components. Illustrating this point, he points to a likely formal idiom in Vasarely and Milova-nović’s shared motherland: medieval stećak stones. Thousands of these carved and solemn stone grave-markers are dotted around the Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian countryside. Like Milovanović’s totems, they reflect a compromise between the universal and the highly personal, and between the human and the sacred.