MIODRAG MIĆA POPOVIĆ: the Painting of Permanent Rebellion

The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts marks the centenary of the birth of the artist and academician whose creative work defined the age of Serbian post-war modernism, with the exhibition titled ‘Mića Popović – The Art of Permanent Rebellion’. The exhibition visitors will get an opportunity to see the work paradigm from all phases of Popović’s painting opus development, created between 1945 and 1990. As part of the thematically envisioned exhibition, the following will be displayed: self-portraits, portraits, figural compositions, still lifes and landscapes, which testify to Popović’s painting abilities being exploratory, susceptible to new formal incentives, while, at the same time, interconnected with artistic traditions, and permanently critical of dominant aesthetic norms, and political ideology of Tito’s Yugoslavia. The selected artworks demonstrate alterations in the formal language part: starting with the reaffirmation of the inter-war ‘poetic realism’ or intimism, through symbolic speech, associative and art informal abstraction, to pop art figuration and postmodernist simulacrum, while, in the content domain, they confirm that Popović’s oeuvre has had an enduring centre, which is the truth – the truth about an ordinary human and his/her fate at a precise historical moment and surroundings. These are paintings that have been kept in museums and galleries, state institutions, and private collections such as SASA, the National Museum of Serbia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the ZEPTER Museum, the Presidency of the Republic of Serbia, Politika A.D., all from Belgrade, and the Gallery of Matica Srpska in Novi Sad, the Vuk Karadzić Centre of Culture in Loznica, the Contemporary Gallery of the Ečka Art Colony from Zrenjanin, the National Museum in Kragujevac, the Gallery of Contemporary Art Niš, the Serbian Reading Room from Irig, as well as various private collections from Belgrade and Serbia. The exposition will be accompanied by films from the Yugoslav Film Archives in Belgrade, and visual materials from RTS and TV Novosti production.