The exhibition Olga Jevrić: Musicality and Sculpturality, authored by Dr. Rajka Bošković, opens on november 6, 2025, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, as part of the cycle Art and Personality – Women Sculptors from the MoCAB Collection (6).
Olga Jevrić — undoubtedly one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century — has been chosen as the central figure of this series in honor of the Museum’s 60th anniversary, recalling that she was among the first artists to exhibit at the Museum’s Salon in its founding year, 1965.
The art of Olga Jevrić, carrying within it a profound truth that lies beyond appearances and material forms, speaks of what is timeless, enduring, and ever-present in human existence.
The essential quality of her entire sculptural oeuvre, despite its many variations, rests on a single dominant idea — the eternal struggle of opposites, both in the physical and in the spiritual realm.
Alongside numerous critical interpretations of Jevrić’s work, another dimension deserves to be emphasized — the musicality of sculptural form. This particular kind of visual musicality in her work evokes an epic tone, an epic resonance, an epic elevation — a descent into the depths of time, memory, and experience.
It is sculpture of epic thought and epic song: vast, austere, arising from distant spheres — devoid of sentimental lyricism or transient moods, stripped to essence, to the universal, to the timeless and enduring — “three times remelted in fire.”
These are not gentle tones of melodious lyricism but strong, weighty, dramatic sounds — raw, unpolished, rugged, bearing traces and scars of the primal — stripped to the truth of existence and to the ever-present struggle of opposing forces: form and void, line and mass, light and darkness, suffering and defiance, birth and decay, pain and persistence.
Her forms are heavy and tense; the material rough and unrefined; the surfaces dark, matte, and unpolished. The very language of form and matter speaks of endurance, of the burden of existence, of the eternal battle of opposing forces within and around us. Musicality and sculpturality coexist in her work as a state of dense, dramatic atmosphere — exalted in its austerity and austere in its exaltation.
“Music? Yes, it is there — as a sonorous tissue projected into form,” Jevrić herself observed — not as an illustration of a specific musical piece, but as “music as a spatial event.”
Listening to music, she perceived and experienced the logic of movement in sound — of sonic masses and lines, of silences imbued with meaning — and she translated that same logic of sound into the construction and movement of sculptural form.
Music was undoubtedly a priceless element that profoundly shaped her sculptural language, for, as she admitted, she might not have had the courage to venture into abstraction at that time had she not possessed such an experience and understanding of music.
A decisive influence on Jevrić also came from the painter Petar Lubarda, whose boldness in resisting the constraints of dominant socialist realism and uncompromising pursuit of his own inner truth as an artist inspired her to follow the same path.
The overall impact of her sculptures — with their contrasting arrested forms, metallic linear structures that pierce or intersect dense masses, and the gaping voids between them — manifests the very drama of human existence.
Jevrić’s sculptural work offers a complete form that reveals itself convincingly from every side, each new angle disclosing unexpected faces of the sculpture — which only in its totality becomes whole.
In this sense, her sculptural language is unique and entirely authentic, securing her place not only in the history of Serbian but also of world sculpture.
The exhibition presents Olga Jevrić’s art through sculptures from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection, as well as works from the collections of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the House of Legacies in Belgrade.