Over the past nearly four decades, Zdravko Joksimović’s artistic practice has been recognized and established through a rich sculptural oeuvre, with frequent forays into other media closely tied to his persistent reflections on the concepts of sculpture and visual form within the expanded field.
As one of the protagonists of the New Belgrade Sculpture scene in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Joksimović has continuously developed, both conceptually and in production, the initial impulses and instances of initiation into the heterogeneous world of materials and objects, steering them toward an investigation of the formal and semantic possibilities of sculptural work. His questioning of what sculpture can be made of led him to a passionate engagement with a wide variety of both standard sculptural and, even more so, atypical materials, which opened up a space for experimentation with technical-technological and manual methods and procedures. Once discovered and adopted, the freedom to combine, collage, and assemble textures, shapes, purposes, aesthetic or utilitarian markers of material and object content – elements the artist is in constant search of – resulted in the building of a refined visual poetics and sculptural sensibility. This is primarily reflected in the media definitions of Joksimović’s works, where terms such as sculpture, object, installation, or more recently readymade painting are taken merely as starting points for interpreting their essential character, which is emphasized through processes of shaping that simultaneously involve traditional sculptural principles and their reinvention. For the artist, the focus is on the transformative potentials of relationships, intentional combinations, chance encounters, adjustments, and confrontations among all the elements of a visual whole, especially when they are able to convey a story or impression, or to associate with forms of life and states of living – themes that have consistently engaged him. For Joksimović, narrativity is intrinsic to sculpture because it initiates the idea of a work’s creation, forms an integral part of the history and “symbolic baggage” of each used material or object, and develops within their newly established relations, connections, and entanglements toward final visual and semantic outcomes. Embedded in witty observations, humorous comments, ironic remarks, poetic condensations, the artist’s works do not seek to communicate a significant message or universal truth to the viewer, but rather subtly reflect the dimensions of everyday existence, no matter how turbulent. Their impact is framed by Joksimović’s ability to make both micro- and macro-narratives materially tangible and relatable through experiences of form, color, tactile sensations, aesthetic and utilitarian functions, organic processes, natural laws, and contemporary social dynamics. An additional interpretive element is brought in through the titles of works, sometimes Magritte-like in their subversiveness or phrased as verses, which offers viewers both a key and an open space for further meaningful exploration of visual situations, scenes, and created forms.
The exhibition is organized into twelve units, each structured around different thematic focuses of the artist’s interests – from explorations of the expressive potentials of visual and plastic principles through materials and techniques, to engagements with phenomena of the corporeal, biomorphological, and erotic, examinations of religious iconography and symbolism, and personal, almost homage-like references to former Yugoslavia and the oeuvre of artist Bora Iljovski. The exhibition presents Joksimović’s works spanning from the late 1980s to his most recent production, encompassing sculptures and objects as well as drawings – a significant segment of his practice and another field of intense reflection on perception and the associative power of form. A key conceptual aspect of this exhibition, which does not unfold retrospectively in a linear manner but through parallel chronological streams of Joksimović’s artistic development, is the open structure of the display. Through a deliberately designed rhythm of changes across the thematic units, it will offer the audience dynamic insights into the beginnings, phases, shifts, and rediscoveries within an ever-evolving artistic practice of devoted seeker.
Zdravko Joksimović (b. 1960, Buče, Montenegro) graduated from the Sculpture Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1986, in the class of Professor Nikola Janković. He completed his master’s degree at the same faculty in 1989, and in 2015 defended his doctoral art project titled Poetics of the Body – A Comparative Analysis of Personal Sculptural Practice and Current Body-Related Issues in Contemporary World Sculpture. Since 1992, he has been teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts, where he was appointed Full Professor in 2014.
He has held over 50 solo exhibitions in Serbia and abroad and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in various European and global cities (Bratislava, Warsaw, Lisbon, Strasbourg, Paris, Budapest, Moscow, Amsterdam, Zagreb, Washington, among others). He has completed seven public sculptures abroad, including Demfer – Š kao šuma (Š as in Forest, Blair Atholl, Scotland), and the sculpture Quick Healing (Ohtawara, Japan). He has taken part in international symposia in Japan, Scotland, Austria, Spain, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Poland. He is the recipient of several visual arts awards, including the Politika Award in 2016 for the exhibition Resuscitation of the Artist After 30 Years held at the Heritage House in Belgrade. He also won first prize for the monument to Isidora Sekulić in 2013, first prize for the monument to Đurađ Branković in Smederevo in 2022, as well as the Sava Šumanović Award for 2024.
He is the author of the monument to Zoran Đinđić, unveiled in Prokuplje in 2008, and the monument to Karl Malden, installed on the building of the Yugoslav Film Archive in 2019. His works are held in major public and private collections in Serbia, as well as in numerous museum and private collections abroad (Montenegro, Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Austria, Switzerland, Bulgaria).
For the realization of the exhibition Zdravko Joksimović – A Glimmering Friendship, the Museum of Contemporary Art extends special thanks to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska, the National Museum of Serbia, the National Museum of Šumadija, the National Museum of Požarevac, the National Museum of Pančevo, the Art Gallery “Nadežda Petrović,” the Cultural Center Pančevo, the Cultural Center of Belgrade, the Cultural Center of Sopot, the Center for Art Education – Šumatovačka, the Gallery of Contemporary Art Niš, Museum Zepter, the art collections of Wiener Städtische osiguranje a.d.o. Belgrade, Yettel, and Publikum, as well as the galleries ARTE, B2, RIMA, X Vitamin, Viline Vode, H2O and numerous private collectors and owners of works by Zdravko Joksimović.
Exhibition Curator: Miroslav Karić