ENERGY VERTICALS
Archive of Line Correlations
Zorica Milisavljevic and Selman Trtovac
Salon 77
In 1981, in a conversation with Klaus Rinke at the Stuttgart Kunsthalle, Joseph Beuys expressed the idea that there is an element of drawing in every person’s life, regardless of profession, experience or artistic education. At the heart of the work of the authors of this exhibition, Zorica Milisavljevic and Selman Trtovac, is the view that the art of drawing transcends the framework of craft skills and classical visual performance. Following and deepening the thought of Joseph Beuys, they follow the idea that the act of drawing a line is a universal, human action, a fundamental impulse that belongs to everyone.
Starting from this premise, the authors consciously reject virtuosity, technique and learned control. Instead, they turn to traces that emerge from a shared, collective consciousness, that segment of human nature that, through basic gestures and movements, runs through the entire history of culture. In this sense, they include other people in the universal, shared process of drawing, thus overcoming the exclusivity of personal expression.
As part of the exhibition at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Niš, the drawing process takes place performatively and ritualistically. Through a fifteen-minute action of concentrated drawing of vertical lines, together with participants of different generations, professions, genders and physical constitutions, the authors discover an ancient element of human consciousness that has been materialized into culture and civilization throughout history.
Participants are invited to immerse themselves in a state of meditative presence for fifteen minutes. During this time, they perform a series of continuous, simple strokes that function as energetic verticals: imaginary channels that connect up and down, sky and earth, conscious and unconscious. Each line becomes a short-term record of life force, a moment when the thought process passes into physical vibration. The resulting drawing is not a representation but a trace of the very essence of life.
There is no failed outcome in this approach. Each resulting drawing is a visual consequence of a short-term drawing process, and together they form an Archive of linear correlations through a long-term process of collective drawing.
At the opening of the exhibition, the artists placed large-format papers, approximately the dimensions of the human body, on the gallery wall, creating an anthropological framework for the act of drawing. At the bottom of the gallery, two screens are installed on which the previously started process continues, a kind of visual instruction, but also an open invitation to visitors to access their own inner rhythm and join in drawing together.
Zorica Milisavljević
Born in 1967 in Sremska Mitrovica, SFR Yugoslavia.
She studied at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin (1987-1989), and graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade (1992). She was the conceptual creator, mentor and one of the founders of the self-organized artistic and activist youth collective, Gradska Gerila (2010-2017), as well as the artistic collective Društvo udružene odgovornosti (d.u.o.), founded in 2020. She has exhibited in the country and abroad. She lives and works in Belgrade.
Selman Trtovac
Born in 1970 in Zadar, SFR Yugoslavia.
From 1990 to 1993 he studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. In 1993 he transferred to Klaus Rinke’s sculpture class at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, where he was declared a master student in 1997. He became a member of the International Art Guild in 2003. Creator and co-founder of the Independent Art Association Third Belgrade and the Research Station for Contemporary Art Perpetuum Mobile. He received his doctorate in 2012 from the Department of Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. He lives and works in Belgrade.
The exhibition ENERGY VERTICALS at Salon 77 is open to the public until June 30.