Slobodan Peladić

Peladić graduated from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad in 1987, after which he returned to his native Šabac where he was a founder and host of the Kolektiv independent art association. He was one of the three participants from Serbia (the other two are Perica Donkov and Aleksandar Rafajlović) at the Controlled Gesture. Examples of New Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism exhibitions, organized on the basis of an insight into the “matter painting, action and gesture for the second time“, noticeable at the 13th and the 14th Youth Biennale in the Modern Gallery in Rijeka in 1985 and 1987. After this, the exhibition was moving to Koprivnica, Ljubljana, Maribor, Subotica, Sarajevo and Rijeka between March and October 1988, within the then still existing “Yugoslav art space“. As a noted protagonist of a common art scene, he staged a series of solo exhibitions, in the Space for Enlarged Media in Zagreb, in the Equrna Gallery in Ljubljana in 1989, and, at the same time, at the Student Cultural Center Gallery in Belgrade in 1989 and later in 1997, as well as in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991. In the same year, he was selected by curator Zoran Gavrić for the Kunst Europe exhibition in Siegen, and the Transgressional Forms of the Nineties: Postmodernism and Avangard at the End of the 20th Century in the Concordia Building in Vršac in 1998.

Slobodan Peladić’s art heritage is divided into two groups of works with very different orientations, by language and psychology, almost contradictory by their formal attributes. In the first one, he was an advocate of painting of neo-informalism which, being created in social and spiritual circumstances of the 1990s, expressed his own existential experience, and where in this case he affirmed that on those huge surfaces (350 cm x 500 cm), for which it was said that “they irritate with their hellish blackness“, this was not about a postmodernistic “return to the image“ but, in fact, about painting of authentic mood of depression and nausea experiences by the artist himself. In the other orientation, pulling himself together from overcome traumas, Peladić, at the end of the 1990s, in aluminum and corresponding technical manner of its processing, created pieces of art with altogether opposing formal and emotional characteristics: Double Ellipse of Full and Empty Form (1997), ownership of the Museum of Contemporary Art, a work created in effect of esthetic perfection and metaphysical aura.