DRAGAN ZDRAVKOVIĆ

Dragan Zdravković was born in 1969 in Belgrade. He graduated in 1994 and completed his postgraduate studies in 1999 at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Department of Painting. He received his doctorate at the Faculty of Contemporary Arts in Belgrade in 2018 under the mentorship of academician Vladimir Veličković. Since 2014, he has been working as an associate professor at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade where he teaches subjects Drawing and Painting.

He trained as a scholar at the art-research program in Leipzig (Germany, 2011) “LIA- Leipzig International Art Programme”, as well as an artist by invitation at the scholarship program in Switzerland (Residency.ch – PROGR Art Center, Bern, 2018)

Representative of Serbia at the 57th Venice Biennale (57 La Biennale di Venezia) with the art project “Enclavia” (with Milena Dragičević and Vladislav Šćepanović) curator: Nikola Šuica (Venice, 2017)

Part of his artworks can be found in several museum and foundation collections, as well as in numerous private collections: Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Collection of the Belgrade City Museum, Christen Sveaas Art Foundation and Collection (Oslo, Norway), Grieg Art Collection, Grieg Foundation (Bergen, Norway), Museu do Douro (Portugal), Zepter International Art Collection, National Museum of Vranje, Museum of Mladenovac, Collection of the Foundation Saša Marčeta (Belgrade), LIA – Leipzig International Art Programme…

Donated artwork: for the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation: “Human Aid”, by invitation of the foundation, curator: Lisa Schiff (SFA Art Advisory | NY, LA, London), humanitarian exhibition and auction in New York and Saint – Tropez (LDF Foundation, Auctioneer: De Puri, NY, 2018)

Donated artwork: “The Lamp”, for the benefit of the foundation and by invitation: “QSPA – Queen Sonja Print Award” by Queen Sonja of Norway, purchase artwork at the auction at Sotheby’s for Advanzia Bank S.A, from Luxembourg (Oslo, Kistefos AS, auctioneer: Lord Poltimore, Chairman, Sotheby’s for Scandinavia, 2022)

Artworks in private collections in Belgrade, Berlin (A&W. Schlag / IMV GmbH), Leipzig (Lenzer), Oslo (Collection of M.H. Blystad et al.), Vienna (Zepter, Graff), Italy, Switzerland (Bern, Zurich /Schlatter), Grenoble…

Last solo exhibition: “Double Moon”, Gallery: Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo (under the support of “Christen Sveaas Art Foundation – Oslo”, Norway 2023)

He exhibited at over 70 group exhibitions in Serbia and abroad, participated in many artistic international workshops and projects. The exhibition at the Zepter Museum is the artist’s 25th solo exhibition.

A high-radiance dystopia 

Dragan Zdravković emits his vision of the world from an imagined future/parallel universe, where, apparently, the human species will not have access. Unlike numerous painters whose post-apocalyptic visions bring scenes of desolation, ruins and burnt areas, his vision offers a tidy and polished, high-radiance world, from an era that will follow after/beyond post-history, post-humanism and transhumanism, in spaces free of human presence. We read such scenes as possible matrices for the reconstruction of the scenography of ancient life on the Blue Planet, whose supposed creators are newcomers from cosmic distances or artificial intelligence, which will perhaps have access to the post-apocalyptic landscapes of the Earth, or they are, on the other hand, visions of the painter’s escapist refuge which he built after emerging from the previous (artistic) stage of hibernation. Be that as it may, Zdravković offers his contemporaries a suggestive, warning dystopia.

The exhibition at the Zepter Museum, which includes paintings created between 2020 and 2024, most of which were created this year, is titled “Transpersonal Fields” by Zdravković. Each canvas represents one transpersonal ⁽¹⁾ field – a surreal visual construction devoid of human presence. The exhibition starting point is the painting “In the studio”, hence, a clip from the real environment where the artist creates his art, in the urban core of Belgrade, where in the background we recognize a detail of his canvas “Joan’s Table”, which reveals to the observer the only reality (genius loci) support from which the painter starts his transpersonal journeys.

At his beginnings as a painter, about twenty years ago, Zdravković indicated that he was looking for a way to use painting tools to present intangible or hardly tangible givens of the environment: atmosphere, air, vacuum, liquid, water, fluids, ether, aggregate states… but also silence. Writing about the paintings presented at the exhibition in the ULUS (The Association of Fine Artists of Serbia) Gallery in Belgrade in 2009, art historian, prof. Ljubomir Gligorijević noted that Zdravković’s certain painting techniques”served the realization of the dream of overcoming the collage process, of creating a fluid language” by which were “created conditions for objects to be within reach in later paintings but also to participate in the “transposition” of space” ⁽²⁾.

It is precisely the complex and differentiated painting of fluids and their interaction with solids that is the essential basis of the surreal atmosphere that Zdravković expertly creates in his paintings. In spaces where gravity has only a partial effect, he builds strange, from a human perspective, mostly non-functional, construction assemblages and interiors. They give the impression of visualizations created on the basis of primitive algorithms formulated by artificial intelligence in an effort to reconstruct or design life on Earth, relying on found fragments, archeology, but also wrong instructions. Such non-architecture is characterized by visual seduction, but also high dysfunctionality. However, the function is a product of potential interaction with the user, who can not be identified it in these environments. Of course, in the interiors of such non-architecture we also encounter non-objects – objects that will remind us of lamps, stairs, windows, bathrooms, appliances, cabinets, pieces of furniture… but with noticeable errors/bugs of the algorithms that created them.

In these sterile, dehumanized spaces, a surprising accent is given by the presence of the organic – a pot with indoor plants or fruit, such as banana or dragon fruit (pitaya). In the manner of memento mori – where the painted details, such as: a human skull, hourglass, just extinguished candles, withered flowers, remind us of mortality and transience, here, in fact, details with vegetation, in the manner of memento vitae – remind us that maybe once there was life on Earth.

Nevertheless, in these seductive spaces, enveloped and drowned in zones of fluid with unusual, mutable characteristics, muted, hypnotic, toxic coloring, by all odds, without proper conditions for human life, we also notice possible escapist corridors – passageways, shafts, windows, bubbles, holes – actually, signposts to peculiar time gates.

Regardless of whether sound can spread in such spaces at all, wanting to be sure of the impossibility of its presence and the sound isolation of the “deaf room”, Zdravković introduces dampers/absorbers of potential sound into certain compositions – somewhere they are painted fur areas, and elsewhere , as in “The Blue Room” and “The Sienna Room”, these are tactile, painted surfaces with rhythmic undulating folds.

With his long-developing painting process, Zdravković ensured his visions free movement and passage through space, time and through materials of different consistencies. The process begins with the selection of templates from the rich offer of advertising and mass culture – by particular recycling of mass-use items from the consumer repertoire, mostly from the second half of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st century, with which he “grinds” our fallen, greedy hyper-consumer civilization, producing raw materials for another form of existence. He makes collages, scans, and additionally processes such templates – manually and digitally, creates distortions, adds shine and reflexes to the surfaces, “breaks” the perspective with various maneuvers, and then returns the processed image to the analog dimension. Carrying it out using a classic, manual process on canvas, but maintaining an undertone of digital coldness and distance, he provides his paintings with a completely unique harmony.

The stylistic coordinate range in which we can place Zdravković’s painting is very wide. The art historian Mišela Blanuša precisely notices the combination of the most diverse artistic influences and expressions: “Starting in the expressionist spirit, by “cleaning” the painting, he reaches a kind of original realism that is in symbiosis with elements of surrealism, cubist treatment of objects, metaphysical painting, magical realism, minimalism and op-art, photorealism and most of all the “new Leipzig school” of contemporary painting”.⁽³⁾ Austrian art historian and curator Lukas Gehrmann labels Zdravković’s artwork with the term “metaphysical pop-art” ⁽⁴⁾, while Norwegian painter Christer Glein interprets: “Behind the shield of a surface polished in the manner of pop art, Zdravković constructs a metaphysical narrative combined with deeply personal stories from the artist’s own life, making the images act like a Trojan horse, which silently enters your consciousness, leaving a long-lasting poetic impression” ⁽⁵⁾. Let’s add that his canvases also possess the properties of algorithm art, images generated by artificial intelligence, but, unlike such apersonal, artificial products, he provided his works with an impressive and suggestive, highly personalized identity through thoughtful, manual finalization.

Danijela Purešević

1. “Transpersonal is a term used by various schools of philosophy and psychology to describe experiences and worldviews that extend beyond the personal level of the psyche, and beyond everyday world events(…) Transpersonal is defined as experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond the (trans)individual or personality to encompass broader aspects of humanity, life, psyche or cosmos”. (Excerpt from Wikipedia)

2. Ljubomir Gligorijević, “Painting and throwing a string”, catalog of the exhibition of D. Zdravković in ULUS (The Association of Fine Artists of Serbia) Gallery, Belgrade, 2009.

3. Mišela Blanuša, “The state of hibernation”, catalog of the exhibition of D. Zdravković in MoCAB Salon (The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade), Belgrade, 2016.

4. Lucas Gehrmann, „Dragan Zdravković – Metaphysical Pop Art. An option on Contemporary Art“, Monopol, Berlin, 2013.

5. Christer Glein, “A Trojan Horse”, text in the catalog of the exhibition “Double Moon”, Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo, 2023.