{"id":2454,"date":"2022-10-06T13:17:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T13:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/?post_type=events&p=2454"},"modified":"2024-10-24T10:57:43","modified_gmt":"2024-10-24T10:57:43","slug":"exhibition-return-to-belgrade-by-mane-sakic-6-10-4-11-2022","status":"publish","type":"events","link":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/projekti\/exhibition-return-to-belgrade-by-mane-sakic-6-10-4-11-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition “Return to Belgrade” by Mane \u0160aki\u0107 | October 6 \u2013 November 4, 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

October 6 \u2013 November 4, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Museum of the City of Belgrade, Resavska 40<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition was realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia and the Sa\u0161a Mar\u010deta Foundation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The exhibition announces Mane’s ‘return’ to the Belgrade audience and the art scene, from which he has been absent for almost ten years,” said Ksenija Samard\u017eija, director of the Sa\u0161a Mar\u010deta Foundation, adding that the exhibition is both monumental in its character and format, yet fragile to the point of sensitivity, as suggested by Vasko Popa\u2019s verses:
\u201c\u2026 I have returned from my journey\u2026 To scatter the ripened stones from my bundle\u2026 Here on the square to share them\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is precisely within these dimensions that this exhibition offers us a cathartic encounter, not only through the artist\u2019s return to the city where he was born but also through a profound connection rooted in origin, the land, and what both is and is yet to become,” Ksenija Samard\u017eija observed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo perversion of the world can penetrate the heart of a whistle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the exhibition catalog, art historian Nikola \u0160uica writes that the “multi-disciplinary project titled \u2018Return to Belgrade\u2019 brings together the artistic achievements of Olivera Katarina, Vasko Popa, and Enriko Josif.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mane \u0160aki\u0107\u2019s Return to Belgrade<\/em> \u2013 Painting of a Compressed Potency<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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When an artist\u2019s visual and emotional observations of the world and life transfer their histories into fine art, they are often mutually intertwined within his or her own conjoined perceptual potentials. After all, art has, since antiquity, identified its universal liberating capacity for expression with various authors\u2019 individual artistic articulations, which is perhaps most notably, and quite freely, found among the merits of modern culture\u2019s imaginary progress.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative will, as a spiritual substrate of the most precious kind, participates in creating experiential illusions, playing with, or even exposing its own role through a variety of art forms. In the medium of painting, acts of abstraction, manipulation of symbols and gestural breaking with public, unquestionable and documented reality are always on the verge of an intense spiritual revelation. Mane \u0160aki\u0107\u2019s compositions emanate the spirit of an implicit every-day urban life; within their rhythmized freshness, strangeness and angst embodied in rather totemic forms that emerge from a liberated, so-called, abstraction; in the shapes that bind evocative floating objects; or in exaggerated external confessions, a battle is fought against inconsistencies, histories and myths that each and every metropolis\u2019 heritage carries. The consolidation of all subsequent moments in Belgrade\u2019s two-millennium long history marked by devastating steel and later gunpowder strikes against its topography and soil, which eventually left it ravaged and burned, as well as the landscapes of the northern Banat plains, or the hills towards \u0160umadija, make for a unique lament over the city. These long lines of overlapping narratives also serve as the artist\u2019s point of departure that draws on the multimedia piece titled Return to Belgrade<\/em>, in which the singing performance, movements and scenography carry the verses, interpretation and music, in an amalgam of the artistic reaches of Olivera Katarina, Vasko Popa and Enriko Josif*<\/sup>. Aside from being a diffused space of historical turbulences and sunlit mornings, they are also a haven for personal introspections, such as the ones confessed by Vasko Popa in his meticulous poetic imagery of real-life difficulties and struggles\u2014from folk proverbs such as the one about spiders covering the sky in webs, to those about rocks and clouds, to the \u201cinterior sky\u201d symbolizing the power of love that flourishes in one small Belgrade apartment. Mane \u0160aki\u0107\u2019s paintings are capsules of colouristic strokes that form painterly structures propelled by the influences from his previous observations, learning, and perceiving, eventually transforming into riddles of ambiguous spiritual exaltation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aesthetic and perceptual experiences appear to end where mythic and heroized transformations of the past begin, resulting in a composition in which the entire body of motifs scatters across the frozen image of latent flowing dynamics, similar to harmonized music clusters that pass through and emerge from the painted fractions of the canvas surface. The horseman and the hero are looming personifications painterly articulated as silhouettes\u2014as if they were an elaborated pledge of the bygone time. The images draw on mythology from folk poetry in a manner that connects the proto-Earth and clouds in the ruined outlines of geographical features, which is reminiscent of the south-Slavic legacy found in Petar Lubarda\u2019s painting. As a result, the painted composition constitutes a vibrant reflection of the intuitive strength of the soil and vegetation, the cityscape and drifting cumuli, displayed through the cloudlike whiteness of the artist\u2019s most striking aestheticizations, which create gestural fluidity of what we observe. This psychomotor principle is also part of cataloguing both evident and more subtle motifs in Mane \u0160aki\u0107\u2019s paintings; the origin of toponyms and morphing figures are all unified within the painterly battlefield; one might invoke poignant Gr\u00fcnewaldian images of violence, suffering and crucifixion, but also of whitish procreation, in which assumptions of cosmic speculations are inscribed in the layers of pigment. There is a passionate approach to some sort of disincarnation, which reveals possible, implicit corporeality of the pictorial confession. The everlasting force of existence, conscious witnessing, and the narrated avalanche of recitative and music flow transpose within the parallel realities into the lengthy process of a painting layering.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In such personal conditioning, portraits and references remain unnamed. And yet, we recognize the presence of the Belgrade past: either in the artist\u2019s representations of long-gone personalities (such as despot Stefan Lazarevi\u0107), or in the organic references to biomorphic architecture used in sculptures or ritual votive adorations of horsemen waging their fierce millennial war against the unholy forces. Such expressive exhilaration is bound to gravitate towards the localised cosmological sensory inflow of the previously experienced world of poetry, musical harmonies and meditative forms. The elements that bind pigment and mass on the painting surface establish a corporeal biological circulating form (typical of some fragments) and introduce a landscape structure, or even an aerial view. In between two blinks, a viewer may recognize urban-like terrains, ancient walls, or personifications of cartographic pieces that transform into striking dynamics of clearly visible shapes compressed into a vibrant expression. The shaded colourist painting directs the viewer\u2019s attention to the painter\u2019s reflection on a suggested urban toponym\u2019s earliest days. Among pioneering representations of sites portrayed differently from how they appear to others are, by all means, El Greco\u2019s famous depictions of a locality known to the history of painting by his cityscape of Toledo, or his aesthetic visions of unified figures, dedicated to biblical and evangelic themes. Overcoming current divisions and ruptures in what truly constitutes advancement in contemporary art requires, above all, expressive promotion of truth in an artwork. Over more than two decades of exhibiting in galleries and art venues in Spain, in Madrid, or his temptations across the continent of the \u201cNew World\u201d, his student visits and shows in New York, Belgradian \u0160aki\u0107 has conveyed his distress over the consequences of geopolitical \u2018last judgments\u2019 and a transition period for visual art. Even a time gap of several decades can still conjure up images of migrants from the pop culture\u2019s most famous city \u201cGotham\u201d, or New York,\u00a0 and their life-saving focus on undiluted emotions, love for and devotion to their origin. In the history of painting, this is typical of visual art created in rapidly changing times after World War II, concerned with the migrants\u2019 experiences and feelings of loneliness and estrangement: from Arshile Gorky\u2019s surrealist aesthetics of enchantment and abstract bioexpressionism in the late 1940s and 1950s, or later in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat in the late 1970s and then 1980s, who received significant media attention and made a major contribution to the promotion of personal freedom and his Haitian-Puerto Rican origin. A discontinued composition that serves as a repository of personal explorations conveys existential hardship related to the surroundings and the galimatias of the consumer society and newly-formed totemisms of the new age<\/em> trends. The reaction to disclosing or concealing irrefutable hierarchies is demonstrated by social-motoric, and for estranged individuals, suppressive and essentially infernal effects. And while the present may be more imposing and powerful than the past, reflecting on the artist\u2019s working time and pilgrimage into the heart of his profession attest to the questioning of one\u2019s own instinctive authenticity. As a result, the phrase \u2018return to home\u2019 appears to be a pledge of artistic experience and its origin is achieved by placing a firm emphasis on the very essence of a creative process.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Aside from references, the paintings also utilize revelations arising from abrupt structural clashes. They can also be examined outside the rational and logical mechanisms of visual perception, and it appears that the dominant mode of observation should be \u201cwith eyes wide shut\u201d\u2014the very phrase used to describe the world where perplexed by cosmic enigmas, an individual life\u2019s fate is suppressed and eyes closed before the laws of the past. It is the same fate portrayed in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s last film of the same title, based on Arthur Schnitzler\u2019s book Dream Story<\/em>. In the work concerned with a secret that has violently shaken both social reality and art, a compromise towards the advantages of faithful love appears to be the only refuge from the occurrences that nearly bring entire cities down. In a painterly sense, the light of some new stars has been ignited in an attempt to defy oblivion, which is precisely what the paintings from the series Return to Belgrade<\/em> convey. As a millennium-long call for freedom and recognition, freedom of contemporary art is, thus, symbolically revealed at dawn\u2014surely on the eighth day of creation. In the paintings of a distinct expression, emulation techniques are depleted, if not cancelled, transforming into a confessional form of an irrational turmoil brought about by the authoritative and socially dominant truth of the enforced and protected artistic correctness. In their magical expressive unintentionality, these works take almost written forms, as palimpsests of the very process, while in a gestural sense, they are linear, powerful and chromatically replete pieces that display \u201cgeological layers\u201d of the artist\u2019s hometown as dreamy outlines coming out of a passionate potency and striking pictorial abundance. Many denuded and authentic confessional works can, thus, be invoked, one of which is, surely, the fusion of artistic phenomena such as Olivera Katarina\u2019s voice (who, by the way, is the painter\u2019s mother), Vasko Popa\u2019s verses and Enriko Josif\u2019s captivating music and their unified vision of ancient Belgrade. There is no separation from reality as it is, nor cancellation of the, frequently disassociated, tradition and heritage. For even this dreamlike archaic Belgrade and a vision of a vanished and rather unfamiliar city could be interpreted as a new suggestive veduta, and, thus, as a layered spiritual, historical, personal, or social genesis. To those who can sense it, Mane \u0160aki\u0107\u2019s paintings are surfaces that provide the excitement of a genuine emotional emission. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0 – Nikola \u0160uica<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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References:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olivera Katarina \/ Vasko Popa \u2013 “Return to Belgrade”<\/em> (1973), program “Return to Belgrade.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

TV Belgrade, Yugoslav Radio Television, October 18, 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music: Enriko Josif | Lyrics: Vasko Popa | TV Direction: Sava Mrmak<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Link to YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo: Bojana Janji\u0107<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2390,"template":"","categories":[25,30],"project-tag":[],"class_list":["post-2454","events","type-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events-behind-us","category-our-events"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events\/2454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/events"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454"},{"taxonomy":"project-tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/warped-development.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project-tag?post=2454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}