GALLERY “PAVILJON”

"Trepča" by Ljiljana Šunjevarić

Ljiljana Šunjevarić's eyelashes.

Ljiljana Šunjevarić's latest art collection will be exhibited for the first time in Nis, in the Pavilion in the Fortress from August 22 to September 15. With these paintings, the artist remains consistent with the issues of social reality, but makes perhaps the first more extensive contribution to the understanding of living conditions in the north of Kosovo in local art. The complex of the Trepča Mining Combine, which symbolizes the failed ideas of socialist workers' progress, indirectly tells us about the policy of restoring Serbia's sovereignty over the province, from the end of the eighties and the more than excessive epilogue from the nineties of the 20th century. However, Ljiljana's paintings mostly thematize the twenty-year transitional vacuum in this territory, issues of people's lives and endless waiting. With that, the artist painted views of this complex in a hilly landscape in muted tones, a genre scene from the Trepča restaurant, and portraits of the staff and its guests. With the Trepča exhibition, Ljiljana Šunjevarić makes precise but open artistic remarks and thereby provokes a response from the public consciousness.

Ljiljana Šunjevarić was born in 1979 in Užice. She graduated, master's and doctorate in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade. He has been actively exhibiting at individual and group exhibitions in the country and abroad since 2000. She was awarded in the field of drawing. She is the author of several art projects in public space. She participated in numerous domestic and international art colonies and workshops. Her artistic works are represented in many collections: Painting Collection / Period after 1950 of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade; Contemporary art collection of Nadežda Petrović Gallery in Čačak; Collection of the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zrenjanin; Collection of the National Museum in Arandjelovac; Collection of the National Museum in Smederevo; Collection of the Museum of the City of Belgrade; Collection of the National Museum in Kraljevo; Collection of contemporary paintings of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Nis and in several private collections. She is employed at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pristina with a temporary seat in Kosovska Mitrovica, as an associate professor.


Bojan Otasevic

On Thursday, May 9, a solo exhibition of Dr. Bojan Otašević, full professor at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac, was opened in the Pavilion in Tvrđava. The exhibition consists of large-format graphics from the "Waiting Room" cycle, created in the last ten years and realized in the algraphy technique with multiple colored passes.

Bojan Otašević has been developing an authentic oeuvre that is compact in its uniqueness and consistency for more than twenty years. From the very beginning, he opted for the world of figuration, that is, for a traditional genre repertoire that is predominantly based on portraits and human figures. However, Otašević uses the motifs that have been the basis of artistic expression since time immemorial as a means of speaking about the current social moment. His lonely figures with lowered shoulders and averted gaze, most often nudes, are a symbiosis of the state of alienation and confusion of a modern man caught in the labyrinth of existing events, which are such that they inevitably cause existential and emotional concern over one's own destiny. The artist presents the figure in close-up, often in a sitting position, without movement, but behind that physical staticness hides an eruptive inner energy, a swirl of thoughts and feelings, which Otašević achieves with a skillful combination of artistic elements based on the force of gestures, the light-dark relationship and counterpoint. gorgeous color spectrum. Calling his latest cycle of prints "Waiting Room" from nameless individual portraits and figures, Otašević creates a kind of group portrait of people from the social margins who are waiting for better times and are potential bearers of necessary changes.

Bojan Otašević was born in Kragujevac in 1973. He graduated, master's and doctorate at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. He organized fifty independent exhibitions in many cities of Serbia and in Canada, Lithuania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro. He is the winner of 23 awards, among which are significant national recognitions for graphics: the ULUS Golden Pin award (2002), the Small Seal (2015) and the Large Seal of the Graphic Collective (2018), as well as awards at international events: the Bronze Pin at the 12th International Biennale "Dry Needle" in Užice, Grand Diploma at the 12th International Biennale of Portraits in Tuzla and Special Recognition for Contribution to Graphics in the World at the Triennial of Graphics in Bitola.

The exhibition will last until May 26


Milan Stanojev

Exhibition Milan Stanojev: in the passage of time,

On Tuesday, March 26, at 7 p.m., an exhibition of paintings and graphics by Novi Sad artist Milan Stanojev, titled Milan Stanojev: in the passage of time, was opened in the Pavilion in Tvrđava.

This year marks the end of six decades of professional creativity of the author, one of the most responsible for mapping Novi Sad as a prestigious graphic center in Yugoslavia, professor of the Academy of Arts, participant of numerous exhibitions in the country and abroad, member of ULUS and Graphic Collective, winner of numerous awards and recognitions, among which stands out the Great Seal of the Graphic Collective, awarded in May 1976 for the graphic of Pear on the Table, made in the aquatint technique.

According to the author of the exhibition, Jasna Kujundžić Jovanov, an art historian and art critic, judging the creativity of Milan Stanojev, who continues to create every day, always carries the risk of being missed, and it is difficult to see the extensive work, which numbers thousands of works and whose visual codes flow in parallel. they intertwine, hint at each other. The overriding impression of symbolic-metaphorical frames, during certain periods, changes its appearance: Milan Stanojev continuously conducts a dialogue with himself, and communication occasionally flows in a direct form, showing the image of the moment, and far more often in the form of a kind of visual sign that expresses his thoughts.

The exhibition in the Pavilion in Tvrđava is the second presentation of Milan Stanojev in Niš, after the solo exhibition of graphics organized in Salon 77 in 1983, and is an opportunity to broaden the professional public of Southeast Serbia. As an author of graphics, he showed various interests: in the early period, his attention was focused on themes of associative-abstract content current in graphics and in contemporary painting, which is characterized by coloring and the gradual introduction of figurative accents and records, according to the author. From the end of the seventh decade, his graphics are characterized by different types of figuration, realized in different techniques, from aquatint, through lithography, which provides him with the conditions for introducing color, to the combination of aquatint and reserver, which enables refined tonal transitions within the black and white range. The thematic situations in which the human figure and the products of man's work and existence are present are characterized by narrative, irony, grotesque, metaphorical-symbolic tone, Apollonian-Dionysian conflict. From pop art "realism" in the early years of his work, Milan Stanojev reached the grotesque and social criticism in the final phase of graphic design at the end of the last century. Over the years, he experimented with the possibilities of the graphic board, performed technological feats on the subjects of "small things" (fruit, everyday objects such as curtains, laundry baskets, pillowcases, etc.), showed the poetic values ​​of landscapes, explored light and shadow in nature and on urban fragments, in order to bring nature back into the associative domain at one point. At the same time, he expressed himself as a draftsman, challenging the viewer to wonder if drawing always preceded graphics, or if the process was reversed.

Although it seems incompatible, it is similar to painting, which represents a significant segment, and since the beginning of this century, the predominant technique in Milan Stanojev's work, the author notes. His paintings of monumental format evoke different stages of graphic work, but at the same time live a completely new and different life, often entering the domain of abstraction. Although current for more than two decades, this part of Milan Stanojev's creativity is still waiting for the right interpretation, which, Jasna Jovanov points out, will perhaps be initiated by this exhibition organized by the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Nis, which the public will be able to visit until April 15.