Mira Jurisic Krkovic was born in 1928. in Churug. She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1955. and finished her after graduate studies at the sane Academy in 1957. She was a member of ULUS and of the Association of Fine Artists of Yugoslavia since 1957. Study travels: Italy, France, Spain, USA. She was in England as a scholarship holder of Mosa Pijade fund.

She exhibited at 12 solo exhibitions, and participated at more than 150 group exhibitions. She realized 15 large size sculptures in space (in bronze and stone). She was awarded with the October salon award in 1972. Her works are a part of permanent displays in many museums and private collections (Contemporary Art Museum in Belgrade; The Museum of the city of Belgrade; Museum of the Revolution in Belgrade; National Museum in Sombor).

Mira Jurišić, FLOWING, 1963, bronze, Contemporary Art Museum in Belgrade

THE HISTORY OF SERBIAN CULTURE, Miodrag B. Protić: PAINTING AND SCULPTURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

MIRA JURIŠIĆ

Mira Jurišić was born in 1928. in Čurug. After finishing the school for teachers, she graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade (in 1955), where she also finished her graduate studies (in 1957), in the class of proffessors Sreten Stojanović, Ilija Kolarević and Jovan Krathofil.

She started exhibitng in 1958. She had made a large number of memorial monuments (in Kragujevac, Rijeka, Pančevo, Bečej, Kikinda), and had also made a significant number of large format sculptures in stone, in Aranđelovac (in 1966), Prilep (in 1967), Bihać (in 1969) and other cities in Yugoslavia. Her sculptures Throne made of stone (placed in front of the Contemporary Art Museum in Belgrade in 1970) and The Sun (placed in front of the Sports center in Košutnjak, also in Belgrade, in 1977) are also well known.

She had 12 solo exhibitions and participated at about 150 group exhibitions of drawings and sculptures in Yugoslavia and abroad. She participated at all October Salon exhibitions that were held to the middle of the Eighties, and was awarded with the award for sculpture at the Thirteenth October Salon.

She died in Belgrade in 1998.

During the last decade of her life she focused her creative energy towards literary expressions. Her books Silk Bridge (KOV - Vršac in 1998) and The Moment of Light (KOV - Vršac in 2002) were published after her death.

In the Yugoslav art of the second half of the Twentieth Century, the sculptors mission of Mira Jurišić is a very unique and distinguished, and it is experienced as a very stirring and strong story of the artist who is concerned with the problems of the man as the bearer of tragic, dramatic feelings. Intelectualy and imaginatively almost all her works are reflexions of suffers in illicit war times, a disturbing story of the men's promethean pains and sufferings that history has built in our restless Balkan soil. This artists' sculptures, with their higlighted epical spirit and philosophical messages, draw attention and stirr our minds by their dramatic shapes and monumental nature of the masses.

Mira Jurišić has established a very unique symbolic system, gathering stylization mostly from the nature, where shapes of vegetation and rudimentary human form metamorphose into each other.

The extraordinary inner beauty of her sculptures express a clear message, that a man is just a part of global courses and temporarity.
From her early work, The Refuge (in 1958), which is treated very realisticaly, to her last works during her associative phase, sculptures treated very roughly on the surface, like The Resistance (in 1961) and The Wall (in 1962), themes such as sufferings and persecution are very strongly expressed. In her sculptures Vigil, Opening, Calming and Reincarnation the form thematicaly and by stile gets very condensed, bearing in its final transformation the distinctive dinamics of inner events that break classic shapes. During the next phase she created sculptures of extraordinary strenght, which she mostly made in the open spaces.

From the periods when she was intensively engrossed in literature, well known are the sculptures In Memory of Branko Miljković (in 1962) and Golden Forest (1966), dedicated to the poets Miljković and Šćepanović, with whome she had a lot in common in the fields of the soul.

The entire artwork of Mira Jurišić expresses a very disturbing and strong story of artist overwhelmed by problems of man's existence. Her man-act, exposed to different powers of phisical and psychological pressures and organic processes of biological changes, looses his human form and transforms into an expressive symbol of feverish resistance toward his inner innexorable destiny.

Origins of those expressive visions that make such deformed and transformed human figure very similar to dark humus, forked roots, broken or bended branches, or wored away stone cliffs, shows the connections of all beings with the nature from which they came and to which they will return. In a very expressive syntesis of anthropomorhal forms of vegetation, its rhythms, its structural beauty and tragic points, Mira Jurišić found her own plastic expression, obvious in her art opus that has been formed for almost fifty years.

Her drawings in a very unique way offer new, authentic sculpture feeling of materialised drawing of plastic forms, masses in space. For her, drawing is not a supplement of the sculpture, it is a reality for itself, simoultaneous reality of drawing and substance as the basic painting and plastic problems.

By using sculptors materials, on plaster, cardboard, using shellac, and with the discret use of the golden dust, Mira Jurišić paints and sculpts simoultaneously in her distinguished manner, the plastic visions of evokative and associative contents. Her modeled drawings were created as a result of her need to complement plastic thoughts and are an indipendent entity submitted to the demands that painting and drawing are imposing.

Natalija Cerović

Momčilo Krković

He was born on 12.03.1929. in Mali Gradac ( in Banija).
He graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1952. He also graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1955, where he finished his after graduate studies as well, in 1958. During 1959. he was in Poland, on his graduate training, as the scholarship holder of the government of Poland.
He takes part in the art life since 1950. In 1955. he became a member of ULUS and a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Yugoslavia. He also worked as a pedagogy worker.
Study travels: Italy, Spain, Austria, Hungary, England, Czechoslovakia and France.

He exhibited at about 20 solo exhibitions, and participated at over 200 group exhibitions. He realized 28 monuments. He was awarded a total of 15 awards (amongst which are the Golden Chisel of ULUS in 1979. and award for sculpture at the Fourth October salon in 1963.), and four public acknowledgements. His works are a part of permanent displays in 40 museums and private collections (Contemporary Art Museum in Belgrade; Modern Gallery in Rijeka; National Museum in Nis; National Museum in Warsaw; Jewish Museum in Belgrade, and many more).

The creative work of Momčilo Krković is a reflection of a unique sculptoring poetics, and he is considered to be, with his recognizable and independent expression, a very distinguished and extraordinary figure in the contemporary Yugoslav sculpture art. With his art works created before the year 1959., a year that, in a sense, is a turning point in his art, he has proven that it is possible to achieve anything that stands in the domain of realistic sculpture, which is very obvious in his portraits of delicately modeled shapes and in the monumental figure for sculpture erected in his home town. He traveled to Poland on his study travel, and during his stay in Warszaw, in 1959., an idea shaped in his mind - after creating several sculptures (influenced by Henry Moore's works, perhaps) that have gradualy distanced him from the realism and thus formed a transition towards complete geometrication of forms - idea that has later shaped the first series of sculptures called "Man the Fortress". By building shapes of strong inner construction and of a unique treatment of form, he created a series of works, where he took as a starting point elements of historical burden, and in his own way created contemporary works saturated with universal meanings. Basicly inspired by human figure - because of what, no matter how abstract these sculptures may sometimes seem, they have associative character - sculptures in this series are built in very well-thought composition relations of vertical and horizontal lines, with few lightly rounded forms and misalignments that are bringing dynamycs to these shapes. Even though they are strictly geometrical they do not make impression that they are cold, mainly because of the structure that makes them alive and gives them their expressiveness. Conceived as monolyth blocks or placed in open spaces, his sculptures at the end of the 1960ies began to obtain new meanings, in his series "Man the City", which were created with the elements of the same plastic grammar. Cut in different kinds of stone or cast in polyester, these art works offered inexhaustible possibilities for exploring all various problems of fine arts, which he thought were enough to fullfil the entire life of a sculptor.
Nevertheless, the 1980ies were a complete turning point. "My river of sense didn't want to leave me in some pond or swamp to enjoy in what I have acomplished, but has continued to roll me down the pebbles of its riverbed, urging me to keep finding possibilities for salvation, points of support, so that the mainstream would not take me down to the meaningless dwelling" (M. Krković). These words manifested through the new series of sculptures, "Appearance of forgotten spaces", that were in every way completely opposite to the works he has created before. Instead of building or constructing, he started to model, creating terra-cottas with images of landscapes, not real landscapes, but imaginary ones (previously sketched, in drawings of extraordinary sensibility), that have been, like architypes, burried deep down in his conscious mind. This unusual and unique idea in the history of Yugoslav sculpture developed in a series of imaginatively shaped works, sometimes more and sometimes less narrative. War events during the 1990ies brought the elements of strong expression into his works called "Under the bottom of times", as well as brutal symbols, acting as documents, but also as warnings; these works and their meaning exceeded current events. His abbility to express the very essence of his thoughts, by using clear symbolic elements, was particulary obvious in a number of monuments he has built. Never being simply illustrative, he used associative forms to ever strongly and clearly suggest at what the monument should represent.
Momčilo Krkovć, in his own words, thinks of sculpture as of "an artistic act of a complex human being" because "the sculpture is not merely an object, but it is a product of thinking, while the skillful hands are just conductors and performers of these thoughts". These words have a strong confirmation in the fertility and diversity of his creative aristic opus.

Vera Grujić