Retrospective exhibitions of paintings and prints by Aleksandar Dević, marking the artist’s 45 years of creative work.
Aleksandar Dević (1954, Belgrade) graduated in 1978 from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, where he also received his master’s degree. For a short time, he worked as a professor at the Art School “Đorđe Krstić” in Niš and at the Faculty of Arts, participating in the formation of the Department of Applied Arts of this faculty. From 2000 to 2004, he was the director of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts in Niš, where he also worked as a senior associate of the Internet Communications and Publishing Service and was the editor of the gallery’s online magazine IIČ. He has had solo exhibitions in many cities in Serbia and in Greece (Volos), America (New York) and Hungary (Budapest). He has participated in more than 50 collective exhibitions in the country and abroad. He has been a member of the Painting Section of ULUS since 1986, as well as the Niš Graphic Circle. He has won several awards, including: the Redemption Award of the SIZ Culture, Belgrade; the Silver Plaque of ULUPUDS and the Special Recognition of the 45th International Festival of Documentary, Short and Animated Film, Belgrade.
In addition to painting, he also works in computer graphics and web design. His paintings and graphics are in private collections in Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, America, and France.
With his decades-long oeuvre, Aleksandar Dević creates and perfects his own world of scenes and visions that are beyond the boundaries of rationalism and perceptual experiences, and under the auspices of imagination and fantasy, which makes him a significant successor to that line of development in our art that was started by Milena Pavlović Barili and Radoica Noe Živanović and applied by the members of Mediala.
From the very beginning, he cultivated a specific approach to figuration. In his earliest works, we can sense the influence of myth, legend, dreams… and in the artistic elaboration, a unique combination of archaism and modernism, rusticity and lyricism. The figure is not only the bearer of the plot, but also a witness and a factor of the ambience that is unusual, fanciful, created from differently treated segments and carries an aura of enigma and mystery. In doing so, Dević stepped into the realm of the surreal and metaphysical, which is the basic characteristic of the entirety of his oeuvre, although during the years of creation, changes occurred in the artistic expression itself, in the iconographic content and artistic structure. The nineties in Dević’s oeuvre are marked mainly by graphics of wondrous coloristic harmonies, which exude esotericism and an atmosphere of illusoryness with a dominant impression of sophisticated visual art.
In the paintings created in the last twenty years, Aleksandar Dević has added new varieties and approaches to his artistic “legitimization”. Occasionally, applying the principle of displaced quotation, he skillfully combined fragments from medieval or Renaissance art with motifs of different origins, creating dichotomously coded imaginary scenes. His latest paintings are full of some unusual dynamics, bravura “architectural” wonders, phantasmagoric machinery, a metaphysical atmosphere that includes a component of life but also a component of its diabolical destruction. The form is futuristically bold, robotic, disassembled and again assembled from a series of parts and details. Possessing a refined refinement towards semiotically complex symbols, he created a series of paintings of the same motif, which is a precedent in his previous artistic practice. Having skillfully and purposefully chosen the motif of the horse/rider, which has multi-layered meanings, mythological, theological, literary and artistic references (the Trojan Horse, the Holy Warriors, Don Quixote, the wooden horse of Dadaism…), Dević metaphorically raises awareness of various issues of a humanistic and ethical nature, because the time of shaken spirituality and growing technocracy requires a reexamination of existing criteria and values in all spheres, including the field of art. Breaking through the boundaries of the ordinary, Aleksandar Dević has created an opus that is extensive, authentic, meaningfully complex and enigmatic, and artistically precisely elaborated and refined. His works from the mid-19th century, which are a mixture of emotions and dreams, reality and reality, carry a latent mystery, enigma and metaphorical referentiality, making him one of the most original creators, certainly not only of the Niš but also of the national art scene.
The exhibition will run until November 10th.