Đorđe Ivačković

Djordje Ivačković graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade 1955. Dealing with contemporary music, especially jazz, he developed his inclination towards painting as an autodidact, following exhibitiong, above oll foreign abstract art in Belgrade, and during study trips abroad. He left for Paris in 1961 where he definitely devoted his time to painting, and where he developed an intense exhibiting activity. He staged his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1963, and he exhibited on a number of group (noted at the IV Youth Biennale) and independent exhibitions: in 1967, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1986, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1997. Independently, he exhibited in Belgrade in the Youth Center Gallery in 1971, in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1977, in the Cultural Centre Gallery in 1981 and in 1988, in the Arte Gallery in 2009, in Kragujevac, in the Rima Gallery in 2011 and 2018 (the Belgrade Period 1961/62). A retrospective exhibition of his work was staged in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) Gallery in 2015.

The forming of Ivačković as a painter outside regular art schooling and outside awareness of circumstances in the local art scene, formed his specific, singled out position from which he, among other things, sidelined the polemical atmosphere surrounding the appearance of Belgrade Art Informel. He built, therefore, his orientation towards abstraction through a fully independent choice, and by a manner of self-education, and he found identical situation in Paris where he was to fight for his own artistic and painterly affinities, starting literally from scratch. He had already been informed about European lyrical abstraction and US abstract expressionism back in Belgrade, which helped him to orient himself in those Parisian art events for which he had already had affinities. Although by some outward formal characteristics Ivačković’s painting could come close to to some congeniality with gestural abstraction of existential origin, it should not be brought into a direct link with this. With Ivačković, namely, this is about a distinctly non-referential painting (hence titles such as Painting, with a date of its creation) for which he would himself give essential characteristics: speed of creation and improvisation, like jazz music, mandatory white background and square format of the object of the painting, giving up corrections after the completion of the painterly act, rigorous removal of any relation towards outside-arty and outside-painterly objectivity.

Djordje Ivačković

Painting 18. III 1971 (1971)

oil on paper cached on canvas

170 cm x 160 cm