GALLERY “OFICIRSKI DOM”
100 out of 1000 works from the fund of the Sićevo Art Colony
The second display of the exhibition "100 of 1000 works from the fund of the Sićevo Art Colony" will be available to the public from Thursday, September 19, from 10 a.m., in the Officers' Home in Nis. The exhibition has an international character and consists of works created in the Colony in the period from 1994 to 2024.
The exhibition "100 out of 1000 works from the fund of the Sićevo Art Colony" is organized by the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art in Nis on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the regular maintenance of the Colony. The exhibition is designed to follow the chronological order of the duration of the Colony, illustrating its basic characteristics (Yugoslavian and international character, participation of artists of various vocations and stylistic orientations). Due to its large scale, the exhibition is realized through two settings. The first exhibition (from August 29 to September 13) was of a Yugoslav character and included works created during the first three decades of the Colony. The second exhibition is of an international character, because since the beginning of the nineties of the 20th century, artists from abroad have regularly participated in the work of the Colony. The exhibition is based on the works of authors from Serbia and other countries (Japan, Canada, Sweden, Bulgaria...), which were created in the period from 1994 to 2024. The exhibition has a multimedia character at the same time, because in addition to works of traditional media (paintings, graphics, drawings) objects, video works and video installations are represented, since the last couple of decades have been participants of the Colony and artists who express themselves through so-called new media.
The landscapes of the unique Sićevka Gorge are a dominant inspiration and a constant artistic challenge for numerous authors. Each of them moved along the selected paths of their own artistic poetics in the artistic creation of their experience of the gorge, using as an initial impulse a general impression, a panoramic view or just a fragment from nature (Kosta Bradić, Milena Jevtić Ničeva Kostić, Rada Selaković, Zoran Vuković, Miroslav Anđelković, Elizabet Matje, Kendži Nagai, Branko Nikolov, Sonja Vukašinović, Rajko Popivoda, Jelena Šalinić, Due Martin, Katarina Đorđević, Ivana Stanković, Miroslav Lazović, Slavica Curk, Ljiljana Šunjevarić, group DimTim...). A number of artists defined their impressions of their stay in the Colony through the symbols of the historical heritage of this region (Čedomir Vasić, Branimir Karanović, Zoran Grebenarović, Jelena Trajković, Vesna Knežević), while others pointed to the antagonisms of current geopolitics, social reality, health situations or behavioral psychology (Zlatko Glamočak, Nina Kovačeva and Stefan Valentin, Zoran Veljković, Ivana Ivković, Milica Ružić, Jovan Spasić, Ivan Milenković).
The author of the exhibition is Milica Todorović, museum advisor.
The exhibition will last until October 10.
For sixty years of regular maintenance of the Sićevo Art Colony, an impressive fund of artistic works was formed, which currently has exactly 1000 inventory items, of which 88 are kept in the National Museum and 912 in the collection of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art. In the collection of the Sicevac Colony, the most numerous are paintings (644), followed by graphics, drawings and works on paper (291), sculptures (33), photographs and works of new media (22).
DRAGAN MOMCILOVIĆ
RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION
DRAGAN MOMCILOVIĆ
On April 25, 2024, the Niš Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art is organizing a retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings by Dragan Momčilović. With this exhibition of selected works from the field of fine art, the artist celebrates 50 years of his artistic work. The exhibition will be officially opened by Goran Stanković, a Serbian writer of poetry, prose, and essays. In addition to the above, he is engaged in editorial work, as a long-time editor in Gradina, then director of the Niš Cultural Center. Since 2002, he has been the chief editor in the same institution. Winner of many awards in the field of literature. First of all, Goran Stanković is a long-time friend and collaborator of Dragan Momčilović. At the opening itself, we will have the opportunity to enjoy the performance of several musical numbers performed by a string quartet from the Leskovac Symphony Orchestra.
Momčilović was born in 1952 in Crna Trava, from where the family moved to Ćičevac, where he finished elementary school, and then entered the five-year Art School "Đorđe Krstić" in Niš. On the recommendation of professor Dragan Kostić, after finishing art school, he started working at the then young and promising publishing house "Gradina", where he established a sign and symbolic recognition, and furnished over 1000 titles. At the end of the seventies, he enrolled in the "Kliment of Ohrid" Pedagogical Academy, became a member of ULUPUDS and ULUS. Even though he was working on book editing, as a technical editor, actually at that time the painterly being was developing in him, inspired by poetry, literary works, above all the poems of Branko Miljković. Fascinated by lyricism and spirituality, he creates his artistic language by building it very thoroughly and systematically. His paintings become epitaphs dedicated to deceased writers or dialogues with contemporaries of the painting profession. Series of diverse works followed year after year in countless combinations of paintings, drawings, objects. Entire cycles of thoroughly elaborated works of art were created: Epitaph, Horizon, The Blue Line of Life, Seven Dead Poets, About Branko Miljković, Dialogue with Todor (Stevanović), Through Painting and Object... In addition to the above, Momčilović has been constantly exploring nature and everything for decades. what surrounds him, but above all by his experience, his memory. Carried away by personal philosophical thinking, imaginary landscapes filled with symbols, abstract pasty surfaces, endless embodiment of the horizon, from which the sun rises and sets as a symbol of life and its spirit, were created.
His palette is recognizable, distinctive, individual, as well as the way of painting and combining abstract, symbolic and geometric expression through colored drawing. Momčilović's versatility in the fine and applied arts of the past five decades will remain permanently recorded, through a large number of awards and recognitions from many fairs and individual and collective exhibitions of members of ULUS and ULUPUDS. We must especially highlight his personal engagement in creating the culture of the city, and his great merits for the formation of the Art Colony "Classic" of the Niš Tobacco Factory (Philip Morris), where he worked from 1993 to 2005. After retiring, he devotes himself completely to painting and working in the studio with the same intensity, creating everyday surrounded by friends and family. With this retrospective exhibition, he marks 50 years of his artistic work, with works carefully selected from his rich oeuvre. Despite the changes he went through, he remained consistent with his chosen creative direction and artistic expression, which is clear and very recognizable. Looking at all phases of his work, starting from the figurative, until the last abstract, he remained consistent with the enformal and associative illusion of the subject form with noticeable traces of artistic abstraction. The maturity and experience gained through daily work and involvement is now here in front of us and he has proven it with his actions. Fragmentation and layering as well as boundless expressive energy fit with the artist's temperament, which is of the same intensity as at the beginning of his creative journey. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog and an almanac with the painter's artistic manifesto. Dragan Momčilović still wants to say a lot and record it permanently on the painting canvas, and we thank him for that from the bottom of our hearts and wish him to continue creating as long as possible.
The exhibition will last until May 25, 2024.
Peking Opera Biennial Posters
EXISTENTIAL ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY SCULPTORAL PRACTICE
a selection from the Fund of sculptures from the collection of the SLU Niš Gallery
On Thursday, March 7, 2024, at 7 p.m., the exhibition "Existential questions in contemporary sculptural practice" will be officially opened in the International Art Studio "Radovan Tranavac Mića". The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art from Niš, as part of the program marking the Day of the City of Valjevo. The author of the exhibition is the museum advisor Milica Todorović.
The exhibition consists of the works of ten sculptors, whose works are part of the Contemporary Sculpture Collection in the collection of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Nis, which is predominantly based on the works of artists from Serbia, but also authors from all the former Yugoslav republics. In front of the audience are the sculptures of Zlatko Glamočak, Mirko Marić, Rajko Popivoda, Zdravko Joksimović, Dragan Jelenković, Marko Crnobrnja, Mrđan Bajić, Gabriel Glid, Radoš Antonijević and Rado Mutapović. The Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Nis has enriched its collection with exhibited works thanks to the participation of the aforementioned authors in the work of the "Sićevo" Art Colony, or purchases from their individual and collective exhibitions realized in Nis.
Ten artists, whose works make up the exhibition, treat completely different phenomena of reality in a symbolic and metaphorical way, through narratives whose sources belong to the fields of human psychology, ethics or are from the domain of ecology, social and social politics.
"On the occasion of the presentation in Valjevo, a selection of ten sculptures created during the last twenty years was made. The exhibition is conceptually designed to emphasize two characteristics typical of recent sculptural practice. The first is of an artistic-visual character and implies the phenomenon of breaking through and expanding the established notion of sculptural, which is accompanied by the process of relativizing definitions of sculpture. The second change is of a content-cognitive nature, and it manifests itself primarily in the domain of expanding the thematic repertoire of sculptural works with those themes that contain a clear allusion to the existential questions of the life of a man caught in the labyrinth of existing social circumstances. We must emphasize that the process of shaking the "certainty" of modernism, which was content with so- called neutral themes and mostly artistic research, began with the appearance of a new generation of sculptors, mostly from the Belgrade art scene, at the end of the eighties of the 20th century, but it experienced its serious momentum only in this century, i.e. the last about twenty years. It is precisely the awareness of contemporary humanistic and ethical issues that is the common denominator of the works that make up the exhibition in Valjevo, pointing us to the existence of different aspects of artistic engagement", says the author of the exhibition, Milica Todorović.
The exhibition will be open until April 1, 2024.
