SEARCHING
FOR THE LOST BALANCE OF ACCOUNTS
From the exhibitions in Serbia's and Belgrade's point of view (which
are the places where the frequency of public exhibitions is continuously
high), last three months of the year 2002 contained the abundance
of possibilities and parallel examples. Some of the critical judgments
or contemplations could be based on the importance the exhibition
has, being the public scene and a review of individual expressions,
above all. According to that, syndrome of retrospective or monographic
exhibition gave richness to the ending of Belgrade's season calendar
through studiously prepared and significantly performed manifestations
created by various protagonists from various generations. Among others,
these are: Vladimir Velickovic, who exhibited his paintings and drawings,
at first in SANU gallery, then in ULUS and Chaos gallery, and subsequently,
in December, he exhibited one map of graphics in the Academia Center
for Graphics and Visual Researches in Pariska street; Miodrag B. Protic,
who had retrospective exhibition of selected paintings and paper works
in National Museum, which coincided with publishing of long prepared
representative monograph by Clio from Belgrade; Momcilo Krkovic and
Mira Jurišic, with mutual retrospective of sculptures, drawings and
sketches in Cvijeta Zuzoric Pavilion; Dragoljub Raša Todosijevic,
who also had retrospective exhibition named Was ist Kunst, in the
Modern Arts Museum.
These events were followed by Marko Celebonovic's one-man-show in
the Zepter gallery, on the occasion of hundred years from his birth,
and the exhibition of Ljubinka Jovanovic-Mihailovic's selected works
in the ULUS gallery, organized on the occasion of publishing of the
monograph by ULUS and Karic foundation, which contains the works of
our representative artists awarded on traditional Autumn Fairs in
Cvijeta Zuzoric Pavilion - the first monograph in the line of reestablished
programme of editions suspended in 1991. A concise calendar of representative
and successfully presented collective exhibitions could be created,
but the necessities of redefining some group exhibitions, in case
when Autumn fair closes the calendar year, could not be avoided (for
instance, the award given to Zoran Pavlovic for his selected paintings-objects
from the Balkan Guignol and Procrustics cycle, greater part of which
was at the same time exhibited in the Cultural Centre Gallery by January
7th 2003). Reevaluations of October Salon's significance phenomenon
impose itself at first in the artistic circles - for October Salon
is for more than four decades a unique phenomenon of Belgrade's central
fine arts manifestation, giving no regards of various selections being
present in it. A public debate could be aroused, concerning the present-day
social changing of status of the artist-being-a-member-of-association,
and concerning the financing by the Republic Serbia and from the City
of Belgrade budget.
It is possible that many reevaluations could be carried out on the
practical basis of social reality and by the range of public fine
arts in Serbia. Alongside with the parameters for questioning fine
arts' language and their meritory specialties in the single and group
exhibitions, there would arouse an interaction between permanent characteristics,
necessary for single preservation as well. In that way, all of the
differences between Vladimir Velickovic, Miodrag B. Protic, Momcilo
Krkovic, Mira Jurišic, as well as between Dragoljub Raša Todosijevic
and Ljubinka Jovanovic Mihailovic, alongside with selections from
Marko Celebonovic's or Dušan Jevtovic's opus, and certainly between
Zoran Pavlovic, Nikola Vukosavljevic, Zoran Dimovski and Naked Maya
graphic calendar by Predrag Neškovic - all step into one fertile series
which could open practical questions as well, and not just lighten
or conceal significance, action and author's contribution. These are
the themes of physical exhibition's preservation, material expenses,
roles and persistence of artist himself or exhibition's organizer
- and of those easily avoided facts concerning the frame of representation,
which could consider tidiness of exhibition spaces, relevancy of museum
lights, successfulness of selected works itself, and which go all
the way to the creation of the key for Galleries' members and Museums
Council, drawing and (a favorite term these days) mapping of genuine
significance and practical motives in the service of imaginary soap-opera
"Who's who, and why something is what it shows itself to be".
Interpretation of the undeveloped art market, auction procedures and
various kinds of arrangements call for a special, but already existing
feuilleton concerning whether everything is, actually, as it pretends
to be, in public and through medias, in all of the virtues of season-end
successfulness. Exhibitions of foreign artists contribute to this
significant example of ripe autumn and winter season, proved by highly
successful photo exhibition by famous Henry Cartier-Bresson in the
beginning of autumn, held in the Cvijeta Zuzoric Pavilion, in cooperation
with French Cultural Centre.
International bindings on the route from ULUS to foreign cultural
centers, which in the first half of 2002 resulted in exhibitions in
cooperation with British Council, and then in exhibition of Mikhail
Grobman, an artist from Israel, are the examples of significant cooperation.
Activity of Goethe Institute in Belgrade resulted in many mediations
and guest performances in the Museum of Modern Arts, as well as in
Cultural center's Artget gallery, in the field of one-man photo exhibitions.
Permanently present necessity of Belgrade's and fine arts' decentralization
will this year result in exhibitions of Vršac's young artists and
Nadežda Petrovic commemorative exhibition in Cacak, the interesting
contribution realized along with the exhibition in Kraljevo Balkan's
Mirror: Face-Identity. In spite of numerous significant exhibition
results, there remains the sad fact of heavy communication and actual
fighting, sometimes loud and intrusive, and sometimes minimized and
tranquilled in order to survive individually and artistically. That
is a paradox, especially when considering the communication's disparity
and questions that could be asked in a dialogue. Possibility of creating
a Forum and/or ULUS website discussion groups, as well as contacts
with magazine's redaction, is somewhat helpful in repressing existing
hints and silence.
Mira Jurišic and Momcilo Krkovic (Sculptures
and Drawings)
Retrospective
- Cvijeta Zuzoric Pavilion, Belgrade, November 2002
"...
Through transparent membrane, we could see sun in all of its brightness,
his warmth did not reach us, and the stars trembled with a cold, black
glow. Thrilled, I have discovered a great square opening on the horizon,
trough that we could see the same paintings, but in clearer and more
intensive colors, with intensified light that, trough the opening,
as with some great headlight, signaled about its existence. Discovery
of the opening on the balloon brought a moment of relief: knowledge
that there is a way out and recognition of incoming calmness. During
the wakening, I have heard the voice of a poet again: Now you see
there is a way out."
Nevertheless, how to reach that way out? Overwhelmed with tranquility
rising from the healing comprehension of hope's usefulness, which
heals her seekers soul's wounds, Mira Jurišic did not ask that question
in her dream quoted above. Even after the wakening, there is no time
for any questions. At last, one of rare peaceful moments aroused,
in the complete harmony, because it is given by the only comprehensible
god - the inner I. It is the moment so precious that it should be
just sensed, watched. Phantoms of war memories, sicknesses, human
foolishness and malice (these two always come together), will come
back soon. The moment worthy to be written down.
At the last decade of life, sculptor Mira Jurišic (1928 - 1998) became
a writer. Her body, weakened with illness, and her intuition, refined
by constant proximity of death, found convenient expressive resource
in incorporeal word. Mira started to write down her dreams, and so
the two books, two dream collections appeared, posthumously published:
The Silken Bridge and The Moment of Light. However, only resource
changed - inspiration and work's purpose still stem from the consciousness
of human transience and from search for the meaning. Human being is
one unique knot of energies and streams; he lasts for a short moment,
almost just as short as the moment of creation is, before he dissolves
and transforms himself due to an unavoidable process of constant decay
and change. Mira's human forms, incapable to change their faith, cramp,
flow, and arise, turning themselves into roots, floods, stone... Horrible
tale, and yet - the perfect harmony. Although the whole scene vibrates
with the world-creating energy, an arch-logic enfolds it in peace,
as infinite as the universe itself. That peace is the proof that there
is a way out, that everything is in order. Subconsciously or not,
the sculptor pointed that the search for peace is her life's constant
aspiration, merely by means of the name she had chosen for herself.
Mira is not her real name, but pseudo-name, abbreviated from Miroslava
(The One that Celebrates Peace).
It is clear that the artist, who strives to reach highest secrets
through his work, must be extremely self-critical. Few years before
her life ended, Mira Jurišic "settled accounts" with her
work in a serious way, by destroying all of the sculptures which she
reckoned to be valueless presentation of her work. That choice, which
she made by herself (excluding the sculptures placed in museums and
public parks), was exhibited on hers and Momcilo Krkovic's collective
retrospective exhibition, in Cvijeta Zuzoric Pavilion, in November
2002. It was the juncture between Mira Jurišic, tragic and aesthetical
artist on one side and Momcilo Krkovic, the constructive optimist
on the other. While the works of Mira Jurišic extend one another,
carrying names that point to one continuous stream and inspiration
(Restlessness, Flow, Reincarnation, Cataclysm, Wake...), four cycles
are clearly visible in Momcilo Krkovic's work, composed as result
of his distinctly active inner life, which is full of constant new
comprehensions and ceaseless growth - spiritual as well as intellectual.
The first cycle, Fortress Man, chiefly in stone, glorifies man, the
master of its faith (and maybe the master of nature, as well), the
creator of artistic idea. The second cycle from the sixties, Town
Man, in stone also, stresses the new, more complex comprehension of
man, emerged as consequence of author's interests and education being
spread outside the borders of academic conventionality. The greatest
change in Momcilo Krkovic's creativity happened in the eighties. Jeopardized
by sickness, which transformed even his usual movements into a painful
success and made sculpting completely impossible, Krkovic retreated
deeply into himself, where he found new strength and new inspiration.
Instead of geometric, almost architectural solutions in stone, he
created rounded, pink terracotta that praised and glorified the beauty
of Christian thought and tradition. This cycle's name is Appearance
of Forgotten Spaces. However, this lyrical period, which the author
calls "Arcadian period", ended briskly in 1997. Wars were
aroused in Croatia, and then in Bosnia; collective escalation of primitivism,
stupidity, and inhumanity had rudely disabled contemplative peace;
it became impossible not to react. Drawn back in darkest reality,
Momcilo Krkovic created a new cycle, which he calls Under the Nadir
of Time. After 1999, new series of great monuments with cross as the
basic constructive element aroused on Pale, Han Pijesak, Sokolac...
However, all of Momcilo Krkovic's works, regardless of their cycle,
material, or format, share one mutual characteristic. Before signing
to the Academy of Fine Arts, Momcilo Krkovic already graduated on
the Belgrade's Faculty of Philology (Slavistic section), as successfully
as he will later sculpture. Afterwards he tried himself in literature,
where he could stay if, for some reason, he did not manage to return
to his first love - the fine arts. He succeeded, but withheld his
literal need for narration of lives, confronting characters and transmitting
messages. Therefore every sculpture and figurine created by Momcilo
Krkovic is, above else, (I will not say "descriptive", because
it is an imprecise categorization, meaning different things for different
people), three-dimensional, a bit mysterious, and a bit like a mystical
tale with necessary optimistic moral at its end.
Mira Jurišic passed away in 1998. Her artistic work and the memory
of her unique and strong personality remains an inspiration for many
artists. Momcilo Krkovic is still an active artist and this retrospective
will surely not be his last exhibition.
M.Damnjanović
DUŠAN
JEVTOVIĆ (1951-2000)
Cultural Center Gallery and University of Fine Arts' Gallery, Belgrade,
October 2002
This
retrospective exhibition, prepared for more than two years, presents
the world of early deceased painter Dušan Jevtovic as being an autochthonous,
creative adventure, originating from visualization of the ideas concerning
sculptures, motives, and themes of his Belgrade. The greatest number
of exhibited works is property of few passionate collectors. Their
assemblage in two exhibitions, simultaneously held in two galleries,
had publicly shown author's unity of concentration and expressiveness
of his handwriting. After finishing the Fine Arts' University in Professor
Mirjana Mihac's class, from his very starts in the early eighties,
Dušan Jevtovic had sought the mysterious symbolization contained in
the trace of figurative fantasy. These expressions are but mere determinations
and starting points of his paper works in dry or oil pastel and acrylic
on canvas.
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We
could easily conduct an iconographic search through the small town
sights, as well as through quality of author's devotion to motive
starting-points of reality's percevation in the domain of dreamed
and fantasized. Author did not evade witty figurative constructions
in his works from early eighties. However, thanks to his technical
consistence and refined palette, his portrayal of mysterious characters
and, as he had clearly shown during the first half of the nineties,
his ambient and exterior visors of Belgrade, are all on the trace
of one painting order, which, as all of this painter's virtues, belongs
to the world of the late 19th century - or to the profiled surreal
base of representations, which some of the surrealistic painters in
United States (such as Edward Hopper) develop from the experience
of their surroundings. With basic contours and darkened by the use
of sfumatto, Jevtovic's ambients show decline into the spheres of
existence which confronts ranges of repression and demolition, as
well as hallucinate escapes from the reality of socialism, in which
he saw the carrier of social desolation. Jevtovic's works, according
to their characteristics, resemble sensual strength of George Seraa's
artistic expression: diffused forms in his paper-works, drawn more
than a century ago, announce shadowed world of inhabited yet lonely
civilization created by personal effort to serve as counter-nature
to culmination of industrial revolution in Europe. Jevtovic created
the stratum of several chosen Belgrade locations, painted in full
daylight, as well as almost nocturnal sights where artist had suggestively
created visible world at the border of poetic ecstasies, by conjuring
transience and themes of expected and repressed tenseness. Shadowed
places and coloristic accents announce sensual energy that Dušan Jevtovic
expressed through sights of abandoned space, which radiates non-illusion
states of pure matter-comprehension. Such is the pastel quite narratively
named The Car Called 'White Tub' in Front of 'Takovo' Coffee-house,
Across the Botanical Garden which presents, in technique of larger
frame used for making of old postcards, a part of an old cabriolet
parked in a location that does not exist for a long tome. In this
group of works, exhibited in the Cultural Center Gallery as well as
in the Faculty of Fine Arts, also belong The Dorcol Pear, No. 125
(which speaks about a suburban address), and especially The Đeram
Market or The Last Stop at the Fair, in which the denseness of complex
colors' moves reaches sublimed experience of an artistic sight which,
mentally and intuitionally, participates in moving towards the quoted
location. In this domain, without associative determination, by questioning
the phenomenal and its effect, author shows that the state of artistic
activity is the situation of indirect replacing, with painters' means
only. A conception of each individual sight has been reached, being
a notification of defining the painter's view into the quiet and non-dramatical
totality of space without participants. In these works, a corner of
based existence develops itself by expressing the right place of oppression.
Resembling fragments of the panorama showing and reexamining effects
of the real time on chosen city locations, these works express consistence
of the painter's language, which Jevtovic formed in relation to requests
which modern culture and changes in fine arts' means impede to the
artist. These changes aroused in the period of transitions in art,
as well as from Serbian and Belgrade culture surroundings during the
last decade.
Works with restrained denseness of the ambient, which Jevtovic created,
show examination that does not take part in dominant languages' changes,
or in rules and expectations of present-day art scene. Instead, they
question many of those changes and rules, through their affective
and longing powers, as with repressed strength.
Nikola
Šuica
NIKOLA VUKOSAVLJEVIĆ
Youth Cultural Centre Gallery,
Belgrade, November 2002
This exhibition, whose expression is purified, is thematically divided
into two wholes: ceramic bread loaves made of clay, and the front
created with peysage drawings. No matter how much, along the rectangular
gallery, a table with bread loaves and panes through which one can
see surrounding sights, appears to present the conception in which
relation between materiality and a outstretched vision with perspective
shows itself as logical arrangement, the spirit of reconsidering the
nature still shows itself through cultivation of author's thematic
and motive designations. Quite presumable, it is also shown in lines
of carefully arranged and relief-graved terracotta loaves. By choosing
ready-made substance, which originates from earth, author offered
"connecting thread" that relates these with Vukosavljevic's
earlier works, which were designed as profaned search trough signs
of material life, through morphological forms of animal world and
through their constant presence in our consciousness and comprehension.
Cycles of water-animals' drawings inked in the same way, as well as
reliefs, cast peaces and sculptures connected with forms and appearances
of walking mammals, presented itself as a research - which wanders
upon vivacity of forms, thanks to efforts in merging the visible world's
fascinations. Therefore, the arrangement of works in Youth Cultural
Centre Gallery reached the middle of mediatory action, as his other
exhibitions actually did - one-man-shows as well as his selected works
in collective exhibitions. Over exhibited works and its solutions
overwhelms the imperative, itself in advantage over thick separation
from feverish preoccupations which, by expression of their intrusions
on present sculptural languages, result in their endeavor over action,
and are directly linked with consciousness of surrounding world's
changing, on the levels of technology and communicability as well.
By intentionally choosing archaic lines, included in thick and massive
terracotta simulating bread loaves and in, renaissance-like, bird's
eye perspective of his landscapes, a special sensible search for shelter
in artist's creation impedes itself to us - being visible in artist's
production of inked drawing as well as in aquarelle, and through his
focusing on ritual rellief drawing's schematics in the offered world
of bread, this ancient product which, in its own natural, sculpture-like
three-dimensionality, makes us sense physical presence and symbolic
circulation of knowledge. By their effect, they represent the attitude
of author who preserves his experience and shelter, for these are
conditions of traditional and modern individual expression's survival.
