Vera Božičković-Popović

Vera Božičković-Popović

(Brčko, 8 May 1920 – Belgrade, 6 March 2002)

Vera Božičković-Popović graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1949 after she had been a member of the Zadar Group. She started to exhibit in 1950 at the exhibition of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS) in 1950, and she had her solo exhibitions, both in the ULUS Gallery in 1956 and 1958. At the time of her stay in Paris in 1956 and in the Bréhat Island (Île-de-Bréhat), together with Mića Popović, during 1956-1957, there was, in her painting, a separation from the previous figurative thematic, and there occurred a gradual pre-orientation towards abstraction. Her solo exhibition in the Graphic Arts Collective Gallery in 1960, simultaneous with Mića Popović’s exhibition in the Museum of Applied Arts is an early example of (anti)painting of informalism at the contemporary Belgrade art scene, and therefore, as such caused a controversial reaction even by the leading advocates of this artistic position such as Lazar Trifunović. In the period between 1958 and 1962, her key paintings were made, including Untitled (1958-1959), Torched Landscape (1959), Penetration of Light (1960), Landscape (1961), Horizontal Composition (1961), Dissipation (1961), and Vertical Layering (1962) (both in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Arts, representing the most radical and most valuable examples of Art Informel not only in her oeuvre but – which is not far to claim – in the totality of production of the Belgrade-based painting of this artistic orientation. Nobody could describe the essential characteristics of Vera Božičković-Popović’s informalism more precisely and, at the same time, more remarkably in a literary sense, then her life and art companion, Mića Popović. “In the early phase of Vera Božičković’s informalism,“ he wrote, “black rivers of lazurite of various density flow and spill over the basic relief of petrified color white, as they manage on their own in canyons and grooves. Their dried-out traces stay, as if this is happening after some natural disasters, in unpredictable places. Weaved jets, snake-like little rivers, flow into huge grey seas. Exciting deltas and sandbars, glued onto background using lacquer for whetting, absorb black lazurite. Lazurite manages to color the sand in the joints and so in those places black, burnt-out and deserted hearths are formed”.

Vera Bozickovic Popovic – From A Painting Into A Painting (1968),<br>combined technique on canvas, 175 cm x 139 cm

Vera Bozickovic Popovic

From A Painting Into A Painting (1968)

combined technique on canvas,

175 cm x 139 cm

Vera Bozickovic Popovic – Penetration of Light (1960),<br>combined technique, 192 cm x 127 cm

Vera Bozickovic Popovic

Penetration of Light (1960)

combined technique,

192 cm x 127 cm