The exhibition Earth – Air by Predrag Nešković at the Museum of Contemporary Art offers a thematic and critical examination of the artist’s oeuvre. Over the past six decades, the Museum has presented Nešković’s work on numerous occasions, through solo exhibitions in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, as well as through group exhibitions and permanent displays. Almost four decades after the retrospective organized by the Museum in 1988, this renewed encounter with his oeuvre provides an opportunity to consider the different phases of his work as parts of a continuous, changing, yet consistently exploratory artistic practice.
Moving through the complex developments of Serbian and Yugoslav art from the mid-1960s to the present, Predrag Nešković developed his distinctive artistic language within the local variant of New Figuration and early Pop Art, while his relationship to painting was subsequently transformed through postmodern irony, appropriation, quotation and the aestheticization of kitsch. His painting practice and his spatial installations/objects do not constitute separate strands of his work, but emerge from a related logic of collecting, appropriating, assembling and transforming existing material.
Through six thematic and conceptual sections, the exhibition foregrounds Nešković’s thinking through painting, which takes images and objects as elements of a broader semiotic and symbolic repertoire of culture. It traces his relationship to his immediate surroundings, technology, popular and media culture, kitsch, and found objects from flea markets used as readymades, as well as his practices of appropriating, quoting and repeating images drawn from the broader visual repertoire of culture – from popular and media imagery to reproductions from art history.
The final section brings together works from the 1978 Venice Biennale with examples of Nešković’s practice from the 2000s, tracing a movement from figuration towards abstraction, the object, space and the very process of painting. Despite major stylistic and medial shifts, Predrag Nešković’s oeuvre can thus be understood as a continuous inquiry into the nature of the image and painting, its status within culture, and the possibilities of the medium itself.
Predrag Nešković (1938, Bijela, Montenegro) is one of the most significant painters and representatives of the Serbian and former Yugoslav art scene of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 1965, in the class of Professor Mihailo S. Petrov.
He emerged on the art scene in the early 1960s. Although painting forms the foundation of his artistic practice, his oeuvre also encompasses objects and assemblages, readymade objects, installations and video works. His artistic practice developed through the influences of post-informalism, New Figuration and Pop Art, followed by the painting of the “New Image” movement and, ultimately, postmodernist pluralism. While shifts in medium, artistic language, genre and technique may appear to represent distinct strands of his work, they are in fact part of a continuous exploration of painting, examining the nature of the image and its status within culture.
Since his first solo exhibition at the Gallery of the Graphic Collective in Belgrade in 1965, Predrag Nešković has maintained a continuous presence on the domestic and international art scenes. Among his significant solo exhibitions are those held at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (1967, 1978, 1983), the Cultural Centre of Belgrade Gallery (1973), Grabowski Gallery in London (1974), Centro Culturale Giorgio Morandi in Rome (1979), Forum Gallery in Zagreb (1980), and the Gallery of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) in Belgrade (1985). Nešković represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale in 1978, and in 1988 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade presented a retrospective of his work. His oeuvre spanning several decades has also been explored in greater depth in two recent monographic publications: Ovo nikada nije bilo (2014), by B. Dimitrijević, published by the Vujičić Collection Foundation, and Sloboda najjačem (2018), by J. Denegri, published by the Vujičić Collection Foundation.
Authors of the exhibition concept and curators: Svetlana Mitić and Una Popović