ZDRAVKO JOKSIMOVIĆ

Zdravko Joksimović was born in1960, Buče, Montenegro.

He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1986 at the Department of Sculpture, in the class of Professor Nikola Janković. He obtained his master’s degree at the same faculty in 1989. Since 1992, he has been working at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where he was appointed full professor in 2014. He received his doctorate in 2015.

The exhibition “Tribute to Bora Iljovski” at the Zepter Museum is his jubilee 50th solo exhibition.

He exhibited at numerous collective exhibitions in the country and abroad.

His seven sculptures have been installed in public space abroad, among which “Demfer-F for forest” (Blair Atholl, Scotland), as well as the sculpture “Quick Healing” (Ohtawara, Japan).

His works are found in the most important public and private collections in Serbia, as well as in several museum and private collections abroad (Montenegro, Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Austria, Switzerland, Bulgaria).

He participated in several international symposia (Japan, Scotland, Austria, Spain, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland).

He has received several awards in the field of fine arts, among which is Politika’s award in 2016 for the exhibition “Reanimation of artist after 30 years” at the Heritage House in Belgrade.

He is the author of the monument to Zoran Đinđić erected in Prokuplje in 2008, as well as the monument to Karl Malden on the side of the building of the Yugoslav Cinematheque in 2019.

He has received the first prize for the monument of Isidora Sekulić in 2013, as well as the first prize for the monument of Đurađ Branković in Smederevo in 2022.

“Tribute to Bora Iljovski”

Zdravko Joksimović presents himself to the public for the fiftieth time with his latest corpus of artworks. An extremely educated artist with a cultivated visual culture, he carries out and markets his ideas and research with a complex creative signature that implies, above anything else, exceptional drawing skills which always remain, regardless of the formal status of the work, his structure. The range of Joksimović’s artistic creativity is quite extensive: from the expressive drawing, realistic portrait to assemblage in which finished objects are implemented and refunctionalized. With an inquisitive spirit and openness in research, the artist is constantly questioning his language, which sometimes leads him to attempt performance, as well as in the construction of installation and ambience in the gallery space. Although his work is well-known and recognized in our art scene, he surprises us with every new exhibition or presentation of his works, because he never stops or is satisfied with what he has achieved, but instead he opens up new research paths. Creative restlessness leads him to new adventures in which he experiments with different artistic means and materials…

In the latest series of works, which was initiated a few years ago as a result of the sculptor’s deep respect and understanding of the painting oeuvre of Bora Iljovski (1942-2013), who is considered the corypha of abstraction deriving from the new figuration of the late 1960s and 1970s in our country, Joksimović tries to translate the ornament of this painter into a sculptural form. For a long time he has been occupied with the spatialization of two-dimensional ornamentation, in searching for and establishing a personal score of rhythms dictated by such an organized line. By using different substrates/graphite plates, rubber and leather, getting acquainted with the properties of those materials, he gets incentives for further research. As a result of this undertaking, we have before us a cycle of sculptures that seem like fragments not strictly limited by the contour edge, but instead represent an extension of creative thought in space, a suggestion of infinity. His wavy lines of irregular flows draw the viewer’s gaze in width or height perspective. Joksimović’s labyrinth created in this way does not restrict the view along a linear path that strongly resonates in its own rhythm, instead it offers a way out of form limitations that only seemingly closes the labyrinth space in an enigmatic manner. The sealing of such a form is threatened not only by the artist’s incisions, surgically precise interventions, which penetrate into the tissue of the form, but also by the colored coatings on the surface and by causing a glow from the depth of the substrate, which is achieved by puncturing metal segments, carriers not only of their own material objectness, but also by emitting the bluish glow of aluminum or radiating warmth of copper sieve that spread from the scars on the epithelium of the sculpture by which coloristic playfulness is achieved.

The artist’s calligraphic poem, which in its first verse refers to the geometric abstraction of Bora Iljovski, has developed and extends in space in different ways. Achieved by a series of parallel lines/incisions of a stretched, straightened, sinusoidal flow, along which occur outbursts that dynamically activate the wholeness of the work. The sculptures are materialized cardiograms of the drawing lifeblood, which introduces us to Joksimović’s bionic world, and at the same time act as a developed, complex score in the gallery space. The calligraphic poem is the bearer of signatures linearly carved into the substrate, which in its course put up with the already mentioned outbursts such as serifs and diacritics, additionally stimulate the rhythmicity in the whole work. By skillfully altering the peculiarities of the substrate, which is announced by its purity, muffled color sound and the role of caesura (which in music signifies silence or interruption), it represents a break in the rhythm of the linear scars cut into the sculpture. In this way, Joksimović syncopates situations within his work.

The thematization of the mimetic or bionic indicates the immediate result of the artist’s work up to now. The trace of his experience in working with wood and in wood, which directly counted on the raster of the fibrous tissue of the wooden substrate, now appears associatively in some works that look like the exterior of the wood mass itself, whose bark is embossed and composed of fragments that suggest and promise further growth and horizontal extending to infinity. Likewise, the works that extend vertically, which arose from his modular, structural art, now by stringing differently colored spots, with irregular edges, achieve three-dimensionality with its order upwards.

With exceptional recognition of materials and their possibilities in expressing his creative ideas, and above all by examining their properties and the degree and logic of flexibility/elasticity, the author, with sovereign control but respecting nature, subordinates their “behavior” in accordance with the targeted result of the appearance of the work itself. We have already mentioned that this latest cycle of Joksimović’s work in the gallery space acts as a developed complex score, a calligraphic manuscript of oriental provenance, which represents variations in accordance with the material, the carrier of the inscription. The author’s interventions most discreetly open the third dimension, by which all works justify their existence as sculptures.

The artist’s effort is apparent in preserving the sensibility of the line, that is, the liveliness of signature, in the works in which he intervened manually, as well as in those that were achieved by mechanical, laser engraving. As his most rigorous definition of drawing, the artist is distinguished by exceptional precision in the pondering on and execution of sculpture, and at no moment does the artist succumb to mechanical intervention, the result of which would be a monotonous drawing. When cutting, engraving with a laser, by which the material is burned, the substrate resists with a rough edge, a thin vibrant structure that in the most subtle way contributes to the revival of such moves. With this, Zdravko Joksimović expresses his creative abilities that harmonize his knowledge, rationality combined with the sensibility of his personal artistic speech.

Bojana Burić