“Niš Drawing – Reflections”
23.12. 2025. – 27.2.2026.
The Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts Niš faithfully cherishes its tradition of annually organizing a specialized exhibition called “Niš Drawing”. For more than thirty years, the exhibition has been the focus of the organizers’ dedication, the exhibitors’ loyalty, and the support of the viewers.
For this year’s “Niš Drawing” exhibition, a three-member selection committee selected works by 64 artists from many cities in Serbia from 102 submitted works, who responded in different ways, i.e. transparently, metaphorically, or symbolically, to the given theme – REFLECTIONS.
A number of artists (Jelena Šalinić Terzić, Branko Nikolov, Jelena Kitić, Đuro Radonjić, Katarina Đorđević, Nataša Stanojević, Bojan Živić, Boris Kandolf, Anita Jovanović Radosavljević, Milica Anđelković) with their artistic observations paradigmatically rely on the natural-physical domain of the concept of reflection. Their works, whether they record the moment that stands between movement and stillness, or rely on optical illusions of waves and reflections, exude a meditative atmosphere, a feeling of calm and silence, and are the product of the interaction of thoughtfulness and introversion of immediate artistic reaction. Most authors (including Sanja Solunac, Bratislav Bašić, Nikola Marković, Bojan Otašević, Anđela Mujčić, Zoran Krulj, Marko Stajić, Natalija Banjac, Stevan Kitić, Mia Arsenijević…) opted for the philosophical connotation of the term reflection, concentrating on the reflection of complicated and confusing circumstances of existing reality on the existential states of modern man, where the angles of their observations of the interdependence of the world and the world-cosmos are completely polyphonically intoned with sources in the domains of economics, psychology, ideology, ethics…
By using various motifs, textual messages, symbols, quotes, artists artistically define the concept of reflection in the context of social circumstances through some of the current issues of our time such as: the position of women, consumer society, petty-bourgeois mentality, worrying alienation, drug addiction, personality fragmentation, identity crisis… The exhibition includes a wide generational range of represented artists, so it provides the opportunity for dialogue and comparison between the works of established artists well-known to the wider and professional public and the works of very young authors who have just completed their art education. The exhibition also testifies to the different understanding of drawing. Some artists approach it in a traditional way and use common means (pencil, charcoal, ink and pen, pastel, watercolor) to build their linear or colored structures lyrically, expressionistically or geometrically cultivated, while others define their relationship to drawing through the expanded field of its activity in other media (painting, digital print, photography, video), aware that drawing is the original beginning, although perhaps slightly noticeable in the final product.