Zoran Pavlović

Zoran Pavlović parallely studied and then graduated from both the Art History Department at the Faculty of Philosophy in 1959, and the Academy of Fine Arts, getting a masters degree in 1961. Hence his parallel activity and role of a painter, artistic pedagogue and a critic/art historian. As a painter, he was a participant, together with B. Protić i V. Todorović, of an exhibition in the Museum of Applied Arts in 1961, an auteur exhbition by Lazar Trifunović, Art Informel – Young Belgrade Painters, where the said two were joined by Ž. Turinski, and also in the Belgrade Cultural Center Gallery in 1962, as well as the Art Informel in Belgrade retrospective, in the Cvijeta Zuzorić Art Pavilion in 1982. He had a solo exhibition in Belgrade in the Gallery of the Kolarac People’s University in 1968, in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1970, in the Cultural Centre Gallery in 2002 and 2007, and in the 212 Gallery in 2011. He published books of collected essays entitled Spaces of Forms and Colors (Clio, 1997), and The Art of Interpreting Art (Faculty of Fine Arts/Plato, 2009). Pavlović described his own operative method applied in the painting from the Art Informel period such as Opus operatum, Orphic Sign, Tribute to George Mathieu, No Title, and others from the early 1960s as follows: “I did not leave collaged non-pictorial matter, rejected rags, and pieces of various textiles, in their raw state as required by authentic Art Informel. I intervened upon them using oil color, striving to enhance, or add to with special emphasis the basic chromatic intonation which it offered to me or suggested to me. Using special dynamic compositional sets, organizing along with it into recognizable yet irregular abstract forms, I also departed from amorphicity“. Pavlović also embraced Art Informel as a critic, and he did so by supporting the first exhibitions by Mića Popović, Lazar Vozarević, and on a number of occasions by his generational contemporary Branislav Protić. He was especially prominent in this as a theoretician in articles such as “New Abstract Painting“ and “Mythology of Anti-Painting and Architecture of Anti-Image“, both published in the Danas weekly in 1961, as well as “Informalism, Neither a Style Nor a Movement“, Polja, 81, Novi Sad, 1965.