Painters of Continuity - the Painting of the Belgrade Group

Author of the exhibition: Svetlana Mitić, senior curator

The exhibition Painters of Continuity: the Painting of the Belgrade Group offers to the public 42 works from the painting collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, where one can see the individual contributions of artists that composed the painters’ section of the group, in terms of asserting the mode of painting typical for the post-war Serbian modernism. The group was formed in 1958, and, besides painters like Đorđe Bošan, Ksenija Divjak, Olivera Kangrga, Majda Kurnik, Marklen Mosjenko, Mario Maskareli, it included as its members several sculptors too: Nikola Janković, Angelina Gatalica, Slavoljub Vava Stanković, and Matija Vuković. The group was formed on the initiative which came from Mario Maskareli and Vava Stanković, although the idea itself of starting a group came about as a natural consequence of many years of knowing each other and spending time together by several artists of the similar poetic outlook.

Figurative expression as nurtured by the Belgrade Group is rooted in the vocabulary of the poetic realism and the circle of intimist painting of the 1930s, and in some versions, as practiced by the members of the Belgrade Group, it will serve as a matrix for developing a different subject matter, with often hidden, cryptic meanings, which sometimes tended to be utterly hermetic. The decision to practice this particular visual concept will put a distance between the work of aforementioned artists and the mainstream line of development of the post-war modernism, and will place it at the lateral position in the later considerations of the development of the Yugoslav painting of the 1960s.

Disregarding the position which the painters of the Belgrade Group had in the respective historical circumstances, by their activity and direct participation in the Belgrade visual arts scene they epitomised a mode of developing an approach in painting that was outside the dominant current of socialist aestheticism, thereby also making a contribution to the better understanding of the complexities of the time in which they worked.

The exhibition traveled to:
National Museum in Kruševac
6/3/2011-6/3/2011
Gallery of Contemporary Art, Niš
7/7/2011-7/27/2011