Olga Jevrić

Olga Jevrić

(Belgrade, 29 September 1922 – Belgrade, 10 February 2014)

Olga Jevrić graduated from the Music Academy in 1946 as well as from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1948, completing a special course in 1949. She also studied art history at the Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade. Jevrić exhibited with The Independents group in 1951. She had her first solo exhibition in 1957 in the ULUS Gallery. She exhibited as a part of the Yugoslav Selection at the Venice Biennale in 1958, and was noticed by international critics. Exhibitions in the Notizie Gallery in Turin (1959) and the Drian Gallery in London (1962) followed. She had her solo exhibitions in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (1964), and in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (1965). Retrospective exhibitions in the Museum of Contemporary Art (1981), in the Student Cultural Center Gallery (1988), in the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2001), and in the Heritage House, Belgrade in 2012. A solo exhibition of her work was staged in the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2016, and in the Ridinghouse Gallery in London in 2019.

The sculptural formation of Olga Jevrić took place in the artistic atmosphere of early postwar years, which she soon outgrew with her early portraits and first Suggestions for Monuments series. Owing by and large to her penchant for music, rather than school-based teachings of the discipline of sculpture, she arrived at her own sculptorly expression represented for the first time at a solo exhibition in Belgrade in 1957, which was considered a crucial year in the history of the postwar Serbian sculpture. Characteristic titles of key sculptures in the oeuvre of Olga Jevrić, ranging from Complementary Forms and Articulations of Space (1956), to Astatic Forms (1960), Forms Under Pressure (1963-1964), Forms in the Making (1964), Held Space (1974) and many others demonstrate her consistent abstract sculptural language. She herself very precisly defined her own characteristic shaping procedure, and original auteur profile as follows: “My method of construction is based upon composite units created by mass, space, and lines of force, that is iron bars, which allow for motion in the formal sence (always in the couplement with the supposed meaning) by moving the center of gravity towards emphasizing action of space, and by enlarging its thematics as a medium, or, making use of infinite possibilities in solving mass, its activity and mutual relations, or by highlighting the role of an iron rod which, in its motion and an interrelated stacking of directions and measures, make it possible to refresh the solutions and keep them within their own reason, and stay within frameworks of the set up and a very specific subjective universe“.

Olga Jevrić – Komplementarne forme (1956-1957), cement i gvoždje, 121,5 cm x 89 cm x 52 cm

Olga Jevrić


Komplementarne forme (1956-1957)

cement i gvoždje,

121,5 cm x 89 cm x 52 cm