Gordan Nikolić

GORDAN NIKOLIC, exhibition realized in cooperation by the ARTE gallery, the DAR MAR Gallery and the Student Cultural Center Belgrade, first of all presented a cross-section of the artist's life, where the evolution of Gordan Nikolić as an artist was presented to the audience from the very beginning of his creative journey until today.

At the opening of the exhibition, a printed bilingual monograph "GORDAN NIKOLIC" was presented, which accompanies the exhibition, highlighting the rich career that the artist developed both on the domestic scene and abroad. The authors of the texts in the monograph are Bojana Burić, Ješa Denegri, Ljubomir Gligorijević, Ljiljana Slijepčević, Ivana Benović and Olivera Janković, and the publishers are ARTE and DAR MAR galleries from Belgrade. All the authors of the texts are familiar with Gordan Nikolić's life work in significant moments of his creativity, and some authors have been following his work since their student days.

Excerpt from the essay on Gordan Nikolić by the art historian Ješa Denegri: "Perhaps Gilles Deleuze's famous distinction: Figural-Figurative (which he introduced on the occasion of Francis Bacon) could be applied when trying to interpret Gordan Nikolić's painting language. According to that distinction, Figurative is equivalent to representation, it is narrative and descriptive; on the contrary, Figural (derived from the term Figure, or, better, pure Figure), despite the existence of the subject data, implies the removal or at least the suppression of the representation in favor of the act of painting, in the name of the image as the result of the procedure and process of painting. And this is precisely the case of Gordan Nikolić, in whose paintings and entire cycles there is precisely the subject data, Figure: mask, skull, figure of a famous singer, but by no means as a motive to be described, never as a goal to be reached. It is, first of all, the initial impulse from which the artist starts, so that during the work, he would process that subject data (which is essentially different from refining) in many different ways, guided by the intention of simultaneous construction and decomposition of the image. That image - perhaps paradoxically at first glance - is never abstract, because it always preserves at least the remotest trace of the original motif, but it is not figurative, least of all representational, because this trace of the representation does not significantly obligate it when determining the process, sense and meaning of this painting operation."