Damnjan: Works on Paper

During his accomplished artistic career, Radomir Damnjanović Damnjan engaged in experimentation and creation in a wide variety of artistic media, although painting was and remains his primary medium of expression from the beginning. Drawing is his continuous experimental training ground in which he manages to realize works of extraordinary artistic value. Drawing followed every stage of his artistic development, and he used to achieve the highest domains of artistic expression with his own autonomy and expressive power.

From the beginning, his work was the subject of interest of many local and foreign writers, art historians, art critics, journalists and all those who were involved in the development trends of Serbian and Yugoslav fine arts. Professor, curator, art critic and art theorist - Jerko Denegri closely followed the artist's development from his very beginnings and eventually became perhaps the greatest connoisseur of Damnjan's extensive and fruitful work. Investigating that oeuvre by focusing on drawings that were created over a period of almost three decades, Denegri gives the audience an insight into Damnjan's complex artistic world viewed now through a different prism - drawing achievements. The publication "Damnjan - works on paper" issued as part of the exhibition in 2018, therefore represents an important professional contribution to a more comprehensive understanding of the entire artistic oeuvre.

"In front of one of the possible selections from Radomir Damnjanović Damnjan's decades-long artistic oeuvre, in this case a selection of works on paper created between 1957 and 1984, once again opens the possibility of insight into the scale of his understanding of art, which also implies the nature of his understanding of his own life. On one occasion Damnjan declared that "there is nothing superfluous in the human spirit", and added that there is also "nothing superfluous in the artist's work", and consistent with these two statements it should be concluded: in each sheet of this selection of the artist's works, his entire artistic belief and existential conviction are summarized and manifested." states art historian and theoretician, prof. Jerko Denegri.