Paintings | spartakdulic

PAINTINGS 2008 – 2016

Curated by Branko Franceschi

Spartak Dulić belongs to the generation of artists who emerged in the nineties at the time when multi-media art became mainstream form to which converged a multitude of artistic disciplines and procedures of post-conceptual art practice. Although he had academic education, his poetics early on included the art of installation and performance. His simultaneous experiments with sound and text, as well as aesthetics of comics and street graffiti, made him a true representative of the generation that considered avant-garde the self-evident strategy of connecting academic and popular cultures, and who practiced it spontaneously. Conceptual, material and technical aspects of this extensive creative discourse, Dulić most distinctively unites in the painting segment of his oeuvre. Selection presented at this exhibition includes paintings produced after 2008. Peculiar method of their execution Dulić had developed in the previous period, including small collages executed as the three-dimensional structure of superimposed colored paper. His large paintings are essentially painted reductions of these spatial collages to two dimensions; hence he considered them a derivative of the cubist solution of real space representation in two-dimensional painting medium. From this point on Dulić’s painting method involved many historically validated procedures, essentially making for a compendium of the significant portion of the 20th century painting experience. According the chronology of styles, Dulić’s consecutive appropriation of the surrealist automatism method is followed by the performative method of painting on the floor, circling around the canvas appropriated from Jackson Pollock, the founder of abstract expressionism. References to the historical painting methods are complemented by the unorthodox choice of painting material that includes a wide variety of working materials such as façade paint, enamel, spray paint and markers. The series of recognizable appropriated procedures ends with those of street art, graffiti and murals. The final result of Dulić’s painterly synthesis is colorful image of the dynamic dense insides that strongly associate at vivisected body or machine, or rather at their futuristic bionic amalgam. Dulić’s paintings are serious contribution to the rich tradition of organic abstraction, the style with which began the great revolution of abstract art, and which to this day remain one of its enduring characteristics.